RE:View – SyFy’s Dune
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.
The channel’s lead-in to its first cablecast was an FTL Feed* 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 ironic that was going to be.
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, “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. Frankly, they weren’t too bad. 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 as something worth watching.
Sci Fi would do 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 itself from David Lynch’s Dune. 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 much. However, Hurt did have some nerd cred and was a vocal fan of the book.
The rest of the cast consisted of some work-a-day character actors with some fairly long lists of credits. Quite a bit of talent from behind the recently shattered Iron Curtain. Some Western European talent you’ve never heard of either, (except Giancarlo Gianni). 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 in Amsterdam on sound stages. This was a necessity due to the tax breaks that were available there.
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 being 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. Honestly, I’ll take the Forgotten Irulan over the other two in a heartbeat.
I’m afraid this fidelity to the source material came with a price, this show had a lot of lag time to it, yes even more than Villenuvue’s.
The actors did their level best, nobody phoned it in and truth be told their performances hold up, I would have to put them 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 they had but the only one who really stood out was Bard 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 Director 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. They tried to avoid green screening were possible but some of it was unavoidable.
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 it was clearly merited.
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 experiment from the turn of the last century.
God Emperor was planned but Sci Fi Channel’s 2004 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 a third series for a while.
By the time the project could be looked at 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.
Besides Dune was from another time in the channel’s history. Back when it had the best TV on cable.**
*Remember those? Oh. You don’t.
**Today SyFy’s Dune is abandoned media. Which is why you can watch it here.
