The long-forgotten TV series in which Dune was proven right

But after Lynch’s mega-flop, it’s widely believed that the Dune franchise has entered suspended animation. However, that is not the case. The idea that nothing at all happened in the Dune universe between Lynch’s overstuffed and incomprehensible (for non-book readers) film and Villeneuve’s triumphant tale of Timothée Chalamet’s messianic Paul Atreides is simply false. A lot happened under the sand.

In 1992 came Westwood Studios’ excellent Dune video game (for complicated reasons it was called Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis, despite not being a sequel), which saw the player take control of one of the Great Houses mining for the precious herb on Arrakis. There was also a great Dune board game where you could play as the noble Atreides, the vile Harkonnen or those sneaky space nuns, the Bene Gesserit (the Bene Gesserit player claimed first place if he predicted which turn another player would play the game). won’).

On a less positive note, Herbert’s son, Brian, teamed up with author Kevin J Anderson to release novels set in the Dune universe (a bloated fifteen volumes, compared to Herbert’s original six). These aren’t highly regarded by Dune diehards, who see them as a weakening of Herbert’s original vision – although HBO was impressed enough to (very loosely) use 2012’s Sisterhood of Dune as the basis for Dune: Prophecy .

The most intriguing chapter in Dune’s hidden history, however, is the franchise’s pivot taken around the turn of the millennium by the Sci-Fi Channel (now Syfy) with the miniseries Frank Herbert’s Dune, and a 2003 sequel. -up, Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune. Together they adapted the first three of Herbert’s six original Dune novels, wisely ending just as the saga was starting to go crazy. (For reasons best known to himself, Herbert continued to bring the loyal Atreides bodyguard Duncan Idaho back from the dead again and again; and the penultimate volume, Heretics of Dune, at one point degenerates into soft porn).