Lucas absolutely ripped off dune. Episode 4 required a rewrite because of it. And I'm pretty sure he's openly admitted he was heavily inspired by Dune. The thing is, Lucas is kind of a hack. There are things I like about Star Wars, but it's nowhere near the level of Dune. Dune is Shakespeare. Star Wars is on the level of a grocery store romance novel. I would love to see a proper film adaptation of Dune along the lines of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. That David Lynch thing from the 80s was horrid. And I think special effects are finally to the point where Dune would be doable. I think one of the biggest mistakes Lynch made, aside from deviating too much from the books and trying to make it too weird, was trying to tackle Dune in one film. You would need to split it up into two or three films to do it right. The world of Dune is just so incredibly rich and detailed I don't see how you could do it in one movie. But yeah Lynch really did deviate from the books. Why were the Bene Gesserit bald in his version? A key plot point is that Paul's mother has blonde hair, just like all of the Harkonnens. She doesn't know who her parents are, and it's an early hint that she's Harkonnen, and therefore Paul is half Harkonnen. It made most of the women in his version look ugly, it was stupid, and it deviated from something that was important in the book. I think he just did it to be weird. And there was a lot of shit like that in his version that was ugly, weird, and not at all like anything in the books.
TBH, I skipped over your post at first because I assumed it was another piece of scat themed erotic fiction.
It's not simply a matter of comparing Star Wars to Dune, but also Dune and Star Wars to previous material. For example, the "twins" idea is straight out of classic mythology, and the "chosen" hero fighting the evil Emperor had already been done previously in material like Flash Gordon.
Currently reading Snuff, started off a little slow but it is a Vimes one so hoping it picks up. The watch books are probably some of my favourite in the series.
It is a very slow start. The books have gone downhill a bit recently but I suppose you can't really blame the poor man with his condition.
It goes way beyond that though. There are more than just a few similarities. Lucas clearly ripped off Dune.
Have you ever read about the many similarities between Dune and Lawrence of Arabia? Frank Herbert is known to have studied the life of T.E. Lawrence prior to writing Dune.
Right director, wrong film. Lucas has cited Hidden Fortress by Kurosawa as an influence on Star Wars. C3PO and R2D2 were based on the two constantly squabbling peasants who are swept up in the story involving escorting the disguised princess and her gold to a safe haven.
Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. This novel owns your god-damned heathen soul. I suggest you run out and buy 17 copies without delay.
The Infinity Gauntlet It’s a graphic novel of an old Marvel cross-over series back in the 90s. Basically Thanos puts on a glove and kicks the entire Universe in the arse.
Your including graphic novels, eh? In that case, I read the 2 most recent issues of The Walking Dead. I give them a rating of boring out of 10.
Just finished The Color of Magic from the Diskworld series. It was my first Diskworld book and I've read it's a bad one to start with. There were a lot of characters poping in and out and the whole thing was rather chaotic. I had a few laughs but I never really got into it much. I bought about 10 other Diskworld books during a sale but I probably won't be starting them anytime soon.
*Discworld. The colour of magic and the light fantastic revolve mainly around rincewind and are the earliest books. They're all worth a read. The colour of magic isn't what I'd call a complex book though...
The books really take off from Guards Guards for me. The books tend to follow one of certain character or group. Rincewind, the witches, the watch, Death and Susan but there are the odd stand alone ones such as pyramids or the truth. The watch books are my favourite books. Keep at them, they really are fantastic. The later books arnt too great, wasn't a fan of Moist for example but he was already in decline with the Alzheimer's by then.