"Children of Dune" miniseries

[The Wormhole]

Still it could have been worse. I remember reading about an adaption some French bloke was trying to make before Lynch (not sure if that was the project Ridley Scott was involved with or not.) If you think Lynch wandered away from the source material, this guy makes him look fanatically faithful! From memory, the two wackiest details I can recall are Paul being immaculately concieved from a drop of Leto's blood and Dune was a rouge planet without a star.

I think I remember that, and yeah it really wandered from the book. Alia was in fact the daughter of Paul and Jessica(!), the Harkonnens were drag queens, Emperor Shaddam was an android(?) and Duke Leto was one of the Thundercats (seriously, I'm not making that up). Talk about weird.

If you're talking about the failed Alejandro Jodorowsky attempt I don't think that was part of it.

http://www.duneinfo.com/unseen/timeline.asp

That does seem to be what I was talking about, as evidenced by Duke Leto as one of the Thundercats.

Though it does seem I screwed up the thing about Emperor Shaddam being an android. He in fact "lives in symbiosis with a robot identical to him. The resemblance is so perfect that the citizens never know if they are opposite the man or the machine..."

There doesn't seem to be anything about Harkonnen drag queens, though I know I've seen a concept drawing done in the same style as these one of a very effeminate-looking Feyd.

And I could have sworn there was a version of Dune proposed which would have depicted Alia as Paul and Jessica's daughter. It may not have been this one, however, but I do remember someone wanted to do it.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

I don't know about whether Alia was Paul & Jessica's daughter or not but Alejandro Jodorowski's version did, at one point, depict Paul & Jessica in an incestuous relationship with each other. Frank Herbert & the studio nixed that bit really quickly. According to the book I read, Jodorowski's script never got made because it was (1) about 11 hours long and (2) extremely anti-Catholic.