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Dune adaptations with their own pages

Dune Book Series

  • Beam Me Up, Scotty!:
    • Several quotes from the 1984 film are widely assumed to be from the novel, most famously the Mentat Mantra, which, in its defense, sounds a lot like something Herbert would have written:
      It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
      It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed,
      the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning.
      It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
    • Both the 1984 film and 2000 miniseries gave us "the Spice must flow" as if it was some kind of Arc Words of the novel. Again, it comes from the former film.
  • Defictionalization: The Lithany against Fear has been adopted unironically by fans in real life. It helps that at least the second half of the Lithany is basically an explanation of the principles of real life Zen meditation.
  • Died During Production: Frank Herbert died in 1986, leaving the Dune series on an apparent massive cliffhanger. His son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson continued the series, supposedly from notes left by Frank, to mixed critical and reader response.
  • Disowned Adaptation: Herbert strongly disliked the direction Alejandro Jodorowsky's version was going to take before the project's termination.
  • Franchise Zombie: Brian Herbert's and Kevin J. Anderson's books. While their plan was mainly to finish the trilogy that Chapterhouse: Dune started, they ended up doing a lot more than just that. On top of the two sequels, they have written six prequels and three midquels. Two more midquels are planned, as well as up to three more prequels. This will mean a grand total of sixteen books compared to Frank's six.
  • Outlived Its Creator: Since Frank Herbert's death, Brian Herbert (Frank's son) and Kevin J. Anderson have written a number of prequels and sequels.
  • Science Imitates Art:
    • Synothele arrakis is a jumping spider named as a reference to its unusually blue eyes, which put its describers in mind of the most characteristic sign of melange addiction.
    • Shaihuludia is a genus of polychaetes — marine worms that mostly live buried in the seafloor sediment — named after the great sandworms (although, of course, it's got a much higher tolerance for water).
  • Unfinished Episode:
  • What Could Have Been:
    • The first three books were originally going to be a single volume, but the story ballooned so much at the planning stage that Herbert divided it into three.
      "I had the place, and the characters, and the thrust, for a monumental story, with a lot of action, people, evolutionary processes displayed. And it kept getting bigger. Of necessity. There were all kinds of things happening... Finally, I just took out how long it should be, and started building from the hack. Where does it have to go? So parts of Children of Dune and Dune Messiah were already written before I completed Dune.
    • Ridley Scott was at one point slated to direct a film adaptation of Dune. Peter Berg and Pierre Morel had been front-runners to direct a new remake in the early '10s, before the project fell into Development Hell.
    • The late Christopher Reeve was reportedly considered for the role at Paul in one of the earlier pre-Lynch periods - which makes the casting of Kyle MacLachlan even funnier as he would later voice Superman in the animated feature Justice League: The New Frontier.
    • Thanks to the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky's Dune, we know more of how Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1970s version of Dune would've played out:
      • Jodorowsky was planning to cast Salvador Dalí as the Emperor, Orson Welles as Baron Harkonen, Mick Jagger as Feyd, Gloria Swanson as the Reverend Mother, Geraldine Chaplin or Charlotte Rampling as Lady Jessica, David Carradine as Duke Leto, Hervé Villechaize as Gurney Hallack, Udo Kier as Pieter De Vries and Alain Delon as Duncan Idaho. Also, Jodorowsky cast his son Brontis Jodorowsky as Paul Atreides, and had him go through several months training in martial arts and other various fighting styles before the project was shelved. Rampling would later play the Reverend Mother in Dune (2021).
      • Dalí's case is particularly interesting, as he only agreed to appear in the film if he was paid an exorbant salary of $100,000 for every hour of screentime; Jodorowsky's response was to give him exactly one hour of screentime, with the Emperor's remaining scenes to be filled in by an animatronic fascimile. According to H. R. Giger (who was set to do character design work alongside Mœbius), Dalí was eventually booted out due to statements he made supporting the fascist Francisco Franco dictatorship in Spain.
      • Jodorowsky was also going to use different bands to compose different musical leitmotifs for each planet. He had already signed up the bands Pink Floyd for Caladan and the french prog band Magma for Giedi Prime.
      • Duke Leto was going to be accidentally castrated following a ritual bullfight. Paul would have then been conceived as a virgin birth by way of his mother Jessica taking a drop of his father's blood and using her Bene Gesserit powers to turn it into semen to impregnate herself.
      • Duke Leto's death in Jodorowsky's version would have been even more gruesome and graphic than his death in the book. In the original book, Leto dies of poisoning. In Jodorowsky's version, Leto would have been mutilated to death, his arms and legs cut off with a giant set of pincers, tortured in an attempt to find Paul's location. When Leto fails to give up Paul and dies, the Baron in frustration then grabs the pincers and lops off Leto's head, tossing it into a box with the rest of his severed limbs, leaving what was left of his body on the table.
      • Jodorowsky had intended to have the ending of his film be vastly different from the book, having Lady Margot Fenring killing Paul by surprise. But as he dies, Paul's consciousness then infuses into the planet Arrakis. Paul then mocks the Emperor, by moving about from person to person, including Alia, Stilgar, and Irulan, who when inhabited, all speak in Paul's voice. The now non-corporeal Paul, fulfilling the prophecy of the Kwisatz Haderach, then causes Arrakis' terraforming to occur immediately, with the skies turning a brilliant blue. The movie then ends with the planet breaking orbit, to roam throughout space, to re-educate the universe.
      • The film's creative team included artists H.R. Giger, Jean Giraud (aka Mobius), and Chris Foss, as well as future Alien co-writer Dan O'Bannon. The movie got as far as conceptual art, a nearly completed script, and some costume design.
      • A huge hardcover book of storyboards drawn by Mobius and Jodorowsky was made mapping out the entire film and was presented to each of the major film studios at the time. However, no studio was willing to underwrite the cost and the project had to be scrapped.
    • The Road To Dune was based on Frank Herbert's original notes. The book changed rather drastically.
  • Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: An inversion in a meta way, since it's the authors and their close ones, not the fans, who mind on this one. Due to the controversial nature of the sequels written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, while not outright spelled as such, some authors, George R. R. Martin and Terry Pratchett being most visible examples, wrote post-mortem clauses to prevent either their families, their publishers or anyone else by the matter from continuing their works after their deaths, in an attempt to avoid a similar situation befalling them.note 


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