Which is quite a trick.

I despised the deLaurentis movie with a passion that's unabated. The subject always brings unbidden to mind the iconic image of Sting in a leather jockstrap, and I can't decide whether to hurl or scratch out my own eyes.

I think the miniseries pulled off the near-impossible task of translating the story to the screen. Dino killed the movie with too many liberties (my god, rain on Arrakis??), but too few can be just as bad. Syffy's version, to my mind, reworked the story just enough to keep it intact as it moved from one story-telling system to another. I noticed differences in places, a few events reordered for clarity, but I never noticed it being wrong.

I'd call myself a "Dune freak" too, though of the purist variety. Maybe it's because I read Dune at such an early age, a first edition in 1965 when I was an impressionable ten years old. As a 10yo boy I was particuarly struck by Paul's ordeal of the gom jabbar, and took to heart the lesson that the measure of a true human is the triumph of intellect over instinct.

Fear is the mind killer, Grasshopper.