The Dark Herald reviews the Sci-Fi Channel’s Frank Herbert’s Dune, the 2000 mini-series that has been largely forgotten compared to the movies.
On September 24, 1992, Leonard Nimoy was watching a countdown timer run out. For a few days, this countdown had been running on a new channel owned by USA Networks. It was a joint venture between Paramount and Universal.
When the timer reached zero an extended trailer started featuring the finest, reasonably priced computer graphics available in the early 90s, combined with some miniatures designed by John Dykstra. The director held up three fingers, then two, then one. With the cheerful resignation of the hopelessly typecast, Nimoy stepped out in front of the Hayden Planetarium, nodded at his friend, the recently widowed Majel Barett-Roddenberry, and began the launch party for the Sci-Fi Channel.
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The channel’s lead-in to its first cablecast was an FTL Feed (You’d have to be older than dirt to remember these SyFy bumpers) from the future, they had found and restored the last known copy of the original Star Wars, long thought to be lost. In 1992, they had no idea how incredibly prophetic that was.
After Star Wars, the Sci-Fi Channel settled into less pricey fair. Here take a look:
It was all reruns of inexpensively priced shows. Star Trek was way out of Sci Fi’s budget let alone Star Trek Next Gen, there had been some discussion of allowing Sci Fi to use them by co-owner Paramount but it was pulled at the last minute. The Saturday morning cartoons were clearly a worry for Sci-Fi. They were never quite sure what they would have. A deal was made with Streamline Pictures and Sci-Fi discovered that “Japanamation” was a thing now. It was an early success.
Five years later, in 1997, Sci-Fi finally moved into original programming. Okay, perhaps “original” is pushing it because their first show was Mystery Science Theater 3000, which had been recently canceled on the Comedy Channel.
However, by 1999, they had a full roster of genuinely original programming. To tell the truth, they weren’t too bad. They were cheap, sure, but usually worth a watch. StarGate SG-1 (again, not original; it had started on Showtime), Lexx, Invasion Earth, Welcome to Paradox, Invisible Man, First Wave. The best-known today is Farscape, which just turned 25, and this post nearly turned into a Farscape tribute just now.
The problem was that Sci-Fi wasn’t getting the eyeballs their shows deserved. The channel still had a rep for cheap re-runs that it needed to ditch (reruns were still the mainstay of their daytime programming).
The idea of a (limited) loss leader was floated. They would buy a big-name property. Hire a respected, oscar-winning but slightly past his prime and therefore not too pricey actor. Spend a shit-ton on advertising and special effects, then penny-pinch the rest. The idea wasn’t to win big ratings but just to get noticed for something worth watching. Because of the DVD boom, these loss-leaders proved to be surprisingly profitable.
Sci-Fi did this once a year for quite a few years, largely because of the success of its first mini-series, a remake of Frank Herbert’s Dune.
That was the official title: “Frank Herbert’s Dune.” The idea was to distinguish it from David Lynch’s Dune, which was only 16 years old at the time, so it was fairly fresh in people’s minds.
The Oscar winner they roped into the part of Leto was William Hurt who got top billing despite the fact that he really wasn’t in this thing too long. However, Hurt did have some nerd cred and was a vocal fan of the book. And the fact that he wasn’t getting much headliner work at that point was a plus.
The rest of the cast consisted of some work-a-day character actors with some fairly long lists of credits. Quite a bit of high-caliber talent from behind the recently shattered Iron Curtain. Some Western European talent you’ve never heard of either (except Giancarlo Gianni and Steven Berkoff). The rest of the leads were promising up-and-coming actors and actresses. I’m afraid none of them made it big… We are talking about the first mini-series here, not Children of Dune.
The show was shot on sound stages in Amsterdam, which was necessary due to the tax breaks available there.
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The showrunner was determined to be as faithful as possible to the novel. What deviations there were, were things that Herbert hadn’t explored and, truthfully, things that were too costly to shoot. The only notable exception is Irulan, who had her character changed into a sympathetic one. This iteration of Shaddam’s daughter was deeply in love with Paul, who alas only had blue within blue eyes for Chani. However, in the sequel, Irulan raises his children.
I’m afraid this fidelity to the source material came with a price. This show had a lot of lag time, yes, even more than Villenuvue’s.
The actors did their level best, nobody phoned it in and truth be told their performances have held up. I would have to put their work over the acting jobs delivered in Lynch’s Dune.
All of the actors from the 1984 version did what they could with the weird material Lynch gave them but the only one who really stood out was Brad Douriff as Piter DeVries. The rest were being hobbled by a lot of voiceovers that their characters were doing. Yes, there was a lot of internal dialog in the book but voiceovers are terrible for any actor to deliver on. The only thing the actor can do is mug along the lines that he/she recorded sometime before. It’s a drag on any performance.
Sci-Fi’s Dune got rid of that completely, the internal dialog was reworked to be external. The writer and director (whose baby this was) John Harrison made it work. The costuming was a lot more Metal Hurlant than H.R. Giger. The sets were the best they could do with the budget they had. You can spot the lighting tricks they were using to make things seem more vast, along with the way they would spread out the extras. They tried to avoid green screening where possible but some of that was unavoidable.
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Fortunately, Frank Herbert’s creation was never about the action.
Sci-Fi’s Dune did surprisingly well. At 3 million viewers, it’s one of the channel’s biggest hits. USA Networks hadn’t planned on making a sequel, but the DVD release put it so far into the black that a follow-on was clearly merited.
It took a while to pull it together because the actors hadn’t been contracted for a sequel and all had jobs lined up after production was finished. This is nothing new, but it can sometimes delay a sequel for years or just kill it.
Children of Dune was launched to an equally good reception three years later. It was a combination of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. It remains the only version of these books so far. It also introduced James McAvoy as Leto. He is unquestionably the biggest star to have come out of this little TV experiment from the turn of the last century.
God Emperor of Dune was planned, but Sci-Fi Channel’s 2004 event mini-series was a revival of a 1970s space opera called Battlestar Galactica. There hadn’t been a serious plan for it to be a series, but Battlestar’s ratings blew Dune’s out of the water. There weren’t going to be funds available for God Emperor for a while.
By the time the project could be considered again, it was 2008, and James McAvoy was hopelessly out of Sci-Fi’s price range. Next year, the channel was rebranded as SyFy, and they wanted a new, different kind of branding. More dark and gritty was the order of the day after Battlestar Galactica.
Besides, Dune was from another time in the channel’s history. Back when the Sci-Fi Channel had the best TV on cable.
SyFy’s Dune now appears to be abandoned media, so enjoy!
What’s your opinion of the 2000 mini-series of Dune by the Sci-Fi Channel? Leave us a comment!
I did like the uniforms of the Sardaukar in the mini-series as opposed the hazmat suits that Lynch’s crew gave them in the 1984 movie.
That miniseries remains one of my favorites. A passion project that treated the source material with respect.
Still consider the Scifi made for tv version the best adaptation. The new film was such a disappointment, so boring, and changed so much from the book that I have not even bothered with Part 2.
Scifi’s Children of Dune was even better and their version of Dune Messiah was more riveting than the book while staying true to the story.
The costumes were so cheap and boring and awful I couldn’t stand it.