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Here's a question for you that is less war and more straight culture. What makes a piece of media truly inspiring? What qualities does something need to possess so that things based on it will be great? I don't mean this in the sense of expertly turning your IP into a multimedia franchise through judicious licensing or whatever. I want to know what happens in the case of something like Dune where licensing doesn't seemed to be handled well at all. Yet it still not only managed to spawn a great movie. It also inspired a legendary board game, hugely influential video game, etc.
What makes Dune such fertile ground compared to, say, Lord of the Rings?
This paragraph threw me for a loop. My impression is that Lord of the Rings is way more of a cultural Thing compared to Dune. Like, there also LotR video games? Action adventure, turn based RPG, RTS, even an MMORPG! There are movie series both live action and animated. All these vary wildly in quality so I'm not sure savvy licensing is the reason for their existence and success. Not to mention Lord of the Rings influence on the development on fantasy as a genre of media in general.
Apologies for not commenting on the more general question on your post, which I don't have many thoughts on, but feels like a very specific cultural bubble to regard Dune as more fertile ground for inspiration than Lord of the Rings...
Right, but that is why I chose Lord of the Rings for comparison. For all of its impact, for all the media based on it directly and indirectly, it has a much worse pound for pound showing than Dune. Sure, it has a forgettable RTS, but Dune II practically invented the genre. Sure, one of the Lord of the Rings board games ended up being great, but Dune has, again, a hugely influential game that people loved so much they were still playing it when it had been print for nearly 30 years.
Was this just luck that Dune has such a stronger showing than a more popular, older IP? Or is there some quality that can be analyzed?
So could your question be rephrased as "why do Dune-licensed games have more impactful/genre-defining mechanics than LotR-licensed games"?
No, because I wanted a more universal examination. People just got really attached to the Lord of the Rings and Dune game comparison. Even the licensing aspect was less about importance for the principle and more about trying to head off nerdy arguments about what counts as influenced by these books. (E.G. how much inspiration does Star Wars take from Dune?)
I mean, if comparing Dune II to War in Middle Earth is a particularly useful comparison for insights, sure, compare away. But I was hoping for universalizable principles here, not just comparisons of these two franchises.
None. They both take inspiration from the same well, but Star Wars is much more open about the roots in the Saturday morning serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. Star Wars starts off with "desert planet" but then leaves that behind for the basic "rayguns and rockets" plot (and none the worse for it).
Dune is Morocco IN SPAAAACE and the Fremen are Berbers IN SPAAACE and he is a lot more pretentious than Lucas about it all. Both of them are planetary fantasies, but Herbert is all "deep environmentalism philosophy man" and Lucas was "and then pow! zap! space battles! stormtroopers! smugglers in starships! the good guys win!" so he's a lot more fun.
It also lifts a lot of plot and characterization from a specific Kurosawa movie. Mostly changed for the better but the parallel is very transparent.
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