Definitely Pandora. Even without avatar body it's pure win.

Pandora

this is such a dumb question (no offence, just my opinion) because to comapre on an Avatar forum, the lovely Pandora full of forest, floating mountains and bioluminescent life with a shiit hole planet completely covered in city is just...well this is set to fail

just to give a comparison, IMO the onle planet which comes close to Pandora is Naboo but still is far far away from being Pandora

If by vivid you mean amount of variation and diversity, then yes, definitely. ;) But then again, SW's been around for a very long time and has had time to grow.

One has to remember though, that the nature of the universe itself, and the way it affects you, are two completely different things. There are many fictional works I can enjoy more than Avatar from some perspectives - but NONE has affected me in the way Avatar has - it's unique in many ways.

tm20 - as I said in my above post, though - one can see fictional universes and worlds from a whole lot of perspectives and viewpoints. Pandora might be wonderful and amazing in some regards, and other fictional words in other regards - it's not all black and white. ;)

Yes, SW has its 6 films behind itself. George Lucas created entire solar systems and galaxies filled with planets with their own unique exterior and inhabitants, JC created Pandora and the Na'vi (and 2154 Earth + technology, if that should count.) I'm not JC, but I'm doubtful that he will ever expand his world to the level of George (or Tolkien), nor do I see why he should, it's great as it is. :)
Just my two cents.

I vaguely remember reading an article which mentioned that someone on the production of Avatar had some kind of 'vehicles and creatures of Star Wars' book and Cameron saw it and said something to the effect of 'we can do better than this...'

I think he has universe-building ambitions.

I can be wrong but George Lucas bought that universe from some random unknown sf writer :P

Frank Herbert of Dune fame was weighing up the pros and cons of suing George Lucas before he died.

So he didn't pay for it ? if so then it's even worse then i thought.

This is kind of a dangerous game for any Avatar fan to take because even I can't deny that Avatar wears a lot of its SF influences on its sleeve (Le Guin, Anderson, Heinlein...). That said, Cameron has been honest and open about this from the start ("Avatar is influenced by every science fiction story I read as a kid...")

http://www.la-star.com/p/pics/star-f...detailed12.jpg
You could get a ship from Coruscant to just about anywhere in this galaxy.

Still not interested :P,

Let me know about ship to pandora :)

I think one of the other things that factors in for me is the creatures.

As some of you know, I'm really into biology, and while these may be films, whenever I see an animal/plant/organism, real or not, I like trying to rationalize/analyze how it might exist if it were real, because that deepens the escapism value of the fiction for me.

When I look at Star Wars, I see lots of cool creatures and races, but they're never really explained in depth, and so they are harder to rationalize, making the suspension of disbelief more difficult.

When I look at Pandora, I see far less "material" than Star Wars strictly in terms of volume of different organisms, but what's there is intricately designed, described, and rationalized even before I rationalize it myself. This makes it all the more fun to try and analyze them, because there's a reward at the end of it in that "Aha!" moment when I realize why something about a creature makes sense, like why Hammerhead Titanotheres have the different colored signaling flaps.

I agree completely. With almost all science fiction films it's just about 'hey let's put in some cool freaky looking creatures' with no attempt to consider physiology or phylogeny or how they would fit into the ecosystem as a whole. The makers of Avatar actually took the time to consider things like that while still striving to produce beautiful and exciting designs. That's not the same as saying that everything in the film makes sense biologically, but the fact that they actually tried to work this sort of stuff out at all means that the resultant organisms are miles more believable than what we usually get. Definitely a cut above the rest.

Hit up wookiepedia in depth.