Yet after Lynch’s mega-flop, it is commonly believed that the Dune franchise had entered suspended animation. That is not the case, however. The idea that nothing at all happened in the Dune universe between Lynch’s overstuffed and incomprehensible (to non-book readers) movie and Villeneuve’s triumphant tale of Timothée Chalamet’s messiah-like Paul Atreides is simply incorrect. Beneath the sands, much was afoot.
In 1992, there came the excellent Dune video game from Westwood Studios (for complicated reasons, it was called Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis, despite not being a sequel), where the player took charge of one of the Great Houses mining for the precious spice on Arrakis. There was also a stonking Dune board game where you could play as the noble Atreides, the foul Harkonnen or those sneaky space nuns, the Bene Gesserit (the Bene Gesserit player claimed first place if they predicted on which turn another player “won” the game).
Less positively, Herbert’s son, Brian, teamed up with author Kevin J Anderson to churn out novels set in the Dune universe (a bloated 15 volumes, compared to Herbert’s original six). These are not highly regarded by Dune diehards, who see them as a dumbing down of Herbert’s original vision – though HBO was impressed enough to (very loosely) use 2012’s Sisterhood of Dune as the basis for Dune: Prophecy.
The most intriguing chapter in the hidden history of Dune, however, is the tilt at the franchise taken by the Sci-Fi Channel (today Syfy) at the turn of the millennium with the mini-series, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and a 2003 follow-up, Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune. Taken together, they adapt the first three of Herbert’s six original Dune novels, wisely ending just as the saga started turning bonkers. (For reasons best known to himself, Herbert kept bringing loyal Atreides bodyguard Duncan Idaho back from the dead over and over; and the penultimate volume, Heretics of Dune, descends into soft-porn at one point).