loremaster wrote: I do not often defend the prequels, but here i have to. Frank sold us:
a man fusing with a worm to become a worm/man hybrid,
little pug-nosed grey skinned aliens
who genetically engineer dogs for chairs.
Trees which grow into homes according to the whim of the owner.
women being made into tanks to clone humans.
etc etc
I don't think that is fair. You can pull everything into the realm of ridicule, with incredible ease, deconstructing it to an insanely simplistic level.
Rosa Parks can end up being just "some rebellious teen who sat on a bus".
A worm hybrid might sound silly if you take just the very basic idea. When you strip away everything around it to make it into as concise a summary of the physical as possible, you end up with some guy who became half-man half-worm.
But Frank never paints that simplistic image. Leto is a man who sacrificed his body and soul to save humanity from itself.
But you are right about the excecution.
Norma Cenva never becomes anything other than a superficial deus ex machina. She is just ridicilously powerful in the setting of Dune. Nobody ever displayed the ability to reshape his or her body by force of will, nobody lived as long as she did, nobody was able to pick something up and dump it in another universe.
The Bene Gesserit all of a sudden being able to turn invisible and whatnot, it's thrown at us when nothing in the originals ever supports those abilities. the Sisterhood's abilities all seem very real, because everybody can mimic those abilities with proper training. Only Other Memory is something truly fantastical and that, Frank plucked from Jungian theories on how we as a species work subconciously and Eastern Philosophy.
You can't really transforms the witches of Rossak into anything other than fireball hurling telepaths who use telekinesis to get what they want.
With Frank Herbert's originals you have to take everything out of context to make them into something that sounds silly, with Pinky and the Brain, you have to construct something eleborate around something to make it into something more than the lame minimum.