Random thought thread!

Watch the extended version with the 20 minute prologue that explains everything.

I am pretty sure Miramon knew this and was poking fun at the movie :)

There was a sonic weapon in the book. The weirding module.

I really don’t remember that. I remember it was martial arts with Bene Gesserit prediction abilities or something. I remember complaining about the sonic stuff when I first watched the movie.

edit:

Question. People watching this in… 1984, they were aware the desert people are like Iran or something right?

Nope, that was movie only.

I was making fun of the movie which added all kinds of unnecessary new things to work out that idiotic ending with Sting and making it rain and all that. Of course the Fremen would have hated for it to just start raining, because that would have killed off all the sandworms…

Everyone knew the desert people were basically Arabs when the book came out, much less the movie. The Fremen are based more on Bedouins than anything else, I believe, but other groups are related to other nationalities, like quasi-Turks in the empire.

Okay I see why the Bedouin, maybe Tuareg nomads would work. I just thought spice = oil, and wondered if the Iran 1979 thing was super fresh in everyone’s minds.

Not impossible. I suspect spice was just pure invention however and not meant to relate to anything in our world.

Well that shows how long it’s been since I read Dune.

Heh. Been a long time for me too; I hardly remember any of it, really. But I do remember thinking when I saw the movie that the weirding module was a bizarre new invention to add, that seemed to come from nowhere.

But it’s spice, the thing the guild needed to astronavigate. It fueled interstellar transport!

Oh yeah, another reason I thought Iran, the Mu’a’dib thing, it’s like, jihad.

edit: haha I think the last time I watched it was 1998… With a pothead roommate who really liked Dune. We had many spirited discussions.

They even used language to that effect in the novel. The Bene Gesserit could see that if Mu’a’dib was denied the throne he would take the Fremen on an interstellar jihad. It’s why at the end they reluctantly backed him in the final confrontation between the emperor and Mu’a’dib.

I recently re-read it, and while it’s a classic of SF, I don’t think it holds up all that well. It’s a book for teens and young twenty-somethings. Reading it as a much older adult it seemed pretty corny at times. Very interesting world-building, though.

I vaguely recall that when Dune first came out nobody really could follow it. So they either re-shot some beginning stuff or they added a bunch of voiceover and explanatory scenes. And that’s the version that they show now.

I saw it this week also, and though some of the story is still obtuse, and the effects are often bad looking, I enjoy the film. It’s got a grand scope and it’s an engaging universe.

Interrupting the Dune thread… :)

Whatever happened to saying “lookit”? As in “Pay attention!” or “Watch this!”

Used to hear that all the time, and then it went away.

This is the part where it just reads shit for 20 minutes, with static cartoon pictures, right?

Really cold Coors Light tastes good on the beach.

It does not taste good anywhere else.

Golf courses.

Funny you say that because on the golf course is the only place over the 10 years where I have had a Coors product. I actually prefer the old Banquet Coors.

I’m old enough to remember when Banquet Coors was the only Coors and it was only brewed in Colorado. So Coors was this exotic, legendary beer for which folks made special trips to Colorado. The odd thing is that New Glarus Spotted Cow, brewed right here in Wisconsin, has become kind of like that. It always strikes me funny when visitors talk about it like that, but, since I live in Wisconsin, I can get it whenever I want. It is good though.