Dune: Worst Franchise in History

repoman wrote:
or "Holodeck comes to life". Damn, I would have that holodeck destroyed for all the chaos it caused.

Worst job in the world.....swabbing out the holodeck after the weekend

Sting in a metal Speedo. Game over. Dune the movie rules.

Erik Twice wrote: What I still don't know: Why is the Herbert state so stingy with the license?

Kevin J. Anderson.

All of the Herbert Limited Partnership's decision-making altered radically when Anderfuck came in to write the first of the prequel novels "with" the brain-dead Brian Herbert (who didn't write a word, trust me). Anderhack, who soon became an HLP partner, convinced the HLP that absolute control was preferable to licensing. Thus, the HLP has only two areas of focus: an annual Anderdick novel and an eventual big-budget Dune movie.

Everything else is ignored: comics, games, toys, a possible return to television, bringing in other authors, or anything else at all that's not those two things mentioned above. As an example relevant to this site, FFG never had a chance when they inquired about the Dune boardgame license.

Another fun fact: Andercock's first two acts upon joining the HLP were to give himself an editor's credit on the Last Unicorn Dune role-playing game and then to completely kill off the game. That's why it's so collectible today.

metalface13 wrote: Sting in a metal Speedo. Game over. Dune the movie rules.

Must have been posted. Listen for a minute...Sting comes.

The movie is pretty decent for the first half or so, doing a decent job of covering all the important scenes. Then it gets difficult for a viewer to follow without having read the books first, because the second half of the movie just races through a staccato highlight clip of most of the rest of Frank Herbert's books. Should have been a trilogy of movies, or no movie at all. The books themselves are problematic. There are a lot of interesting ideas, but there are too many flat characters, and some of the most dramatic scenes in the books are too dry, coming across as philosophical debates instead of as drama and action. I think that the boardgame is actually better than either the books or the movie. I haven't seen the mini-series version, but maybe that was good.

i'd quite like to see a release of the original 6 hour uncut version of the film ( i could be wrong but my understanding is it was originally this long).

This seems even less likely than seeing english versions of Moebius works though. Why do great licenses have to be sat on by asshats for so long.

Who knows, at 6 hours it might be decent.

The production and set design of the Lynch film is absolutely amazing.

When Lynch was making this films were running 90 minutes average and the concept of releasing a single story as three or four films hadn't really occurred to anyone yet. Reds has come out a few years before at three hours (including an intermission) and was considered a dinosaur in its delivery. So when Lynch filmed without sufficient oversight by the film house he kept filming and filming and kept releasing snippets for people to see. Eventually Universal had a serious look (he was way over budget) and it was quite a scandal at the time. They told him it had to come in under two hours and the release length was about two and a half.

Were the same thing happening today Lynch would have come to Universal and said, "great news! I have enough for three films!" and it would have made three times as much money. As it stood the original release just has scads of material ripped out of it, and it's pretty apparent that things are missing. My buddy that hadn't read the book though Lynch was just being enigmatic. He genuinely liked the film. When I explained to him that all the missing material was in the book he was pissed. He went from loving the movie to hating it in about ten seconds.

S.

Legitimacy, meet window.