The Dune Franchise Tries Again — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #110

The world now has anoth­er Dune film, and this time Warn­er Bros. is seri­ous about a fran­chise, with at least one sequel planned and a pre­quel TV series in the works. With thou­sands of years worth of world build­ing, the books by Frank Her­bert and the world now being fleshed out by his son Bri­an Her­bert with Kevin J. Ander­son offer more source mate­r­i­al than Star Wars for poten­tial film­mak­ers to play with, but is this world any­where near as fun?

Your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er and Bri­an Hirt are joined by Bri­an Casey (broth­er of The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life’s Dylan Casey) and Three if By Space senior edi­tor Erin Con­rad to talk about whether this series is real­ly adapt­able to the screen at all, and we con­sid­er past attempts by David Lynch and Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky (rather slight­ing the tedious TV ver­sion). Is the new ver­sion more suc­cess­ful? More fem­i­nist? Less colo­nial­ist?

Is the lore just too packed into the books to con­vey ade­quate­ly? When Frank Her­bert jumps for­ward 3000 years, is that a path that movie­go­ers will want to fol­low, even if famil­iar char­ac­ters can still be present as talk­a­tive ances­tral mem­o­ries in new char­ac­ters’ heads or come back as clones?

For points of com­par­i­son, we touch on not only Star Wars, but Out­lander, Picard, The Orville, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Walk­ing Dead, The Dark Tow­er, and more.

Some arti­cles that fed into our dis­cus­sion include:

• “Dune: sci­ence fiction’s answer to Lord of the Rings” by Ali­son Flood
• “Spice World: WIRED Traces the Dune Lega­cy”
• “Denis Vil­leneuve Gave ‘Dune’ Writer Manda­to­ry Goal: Focus on the Women Char­ac­ters” by Zack Sharf
• “Why Is ‘Dune’ a Sci-Fi Film With No Com­put­ers? Let’s Explain” by Chase Hutchin­son
• “What Draws Us to the Reac­tionary Dark­ness of ‘Dune’?” By Chris Dite
• “Race Con­scious­ness: Fas­cism and Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ ” by Jor­dan S. Car­roll

Fol­low Erin @ErinConrad2.

This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choos­ing a paid sub­scrip­tion through Apple Pod­casts. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.