Originally published at: The entire 34,000-year DUNE timeline explained in one 10-minute video | Boing Boing
…
7 Likes
I thought that was the point with Dune.
A huge chunk of it is apparently about a Worm God Man.
10 Likes
It’s ok if you can also ignore all the mispronunciations, misspellings, and improper word usages. I gave up around the War of the Assassins.
10 Likes
I gave up at the repeated mispronunciation of ‘diaspora’. It’s weird - the narration seems to sit in the uncanny valley. It sounds like a real human narrator, but the inflections and pronunciations suggest it’s computer generated.
13 Likes
I’ve heard that some human narrators have taken to affecting the tone of the computer-generated voice, so I’m not sure what’s going on here. At this rate, the Butlerian Jihad might have to occur a few thousand years earlier than scheduled.
10 Likes
I work for HBO who is premiering another version of Dune this week. I am on-call during the launch of the movie. I have never read Dune. I have seen only excerpts from David Lynch’s Dune. This video has not inspired me to actually watch the movie while doing the job of actually broadcasting the movie.
TLDR - don’t watch this 10min video.
6 Likes
Quinn Howard has been doing Dune videos for quite some time, and as I am one of the few people who has actually read all the real Dune books, several times, I have come to appreciate his videos. I agree with @gracchus that his pronounciations can be a bit off at times (for example, in an early video where he mentioned Dune in one of his A Song of Ice and Fire videos, he literally said “Bene Jesuit.”). However, of people who understand Dune, he’s definitely up there, constantly pointing out Herbert’s inversion of the various tropes people (who usually have only seen the David Lynch movie) accuse Dune of having.
ETA: His Ultimate Guide to Dune series is awesome.
5 Likes
I have noticed a lot of that lately. I think what’s happening is people with a very monotone delivery, a habit people without much experience often fall into, are then autotuning/autocorrecting the shit out of their their voice track. Presumably because it’s not terribly well recorded to start.
Those robot like pitch shifts and the weird, inconsistent clipping of certain words can result from over applying certain audio effects.
5 Likes
When someone mispronounces a word that usually means they learned the word by reading it, not hearing it. So in a way those mispronunciations lend credibility to his knowledge of the books.
18 Likes
That’s kind of charming and appropriate, so I’ll allow it. In general, though, it’s a shame that whatever’s going on with his delivery detracts from the content he’s presenting.
1 Like
So how does one pronounce Bene Gesserit? “been guesser it”? “bane ay jesser it”? What?
2 Likes
This is what Carl Sagan said about Star Wars on the Carson Show:
Some of Sagan’s critiques may be regarded as nitpicking—Carson argued Star Wars was simply a “Western in outer space”—but Sagan had problems that ran deeper.
“They’re all white,” Sagan said of the characters. “The skin of all humans in Star Wars is, oddly enough, like this,” looking down at his own hands.
When Carson pointed out there were aliens of various appearance, Sagan noted that “none of them seemed to be in charge of the galaxy. Everybody in charge of the galaxy seemed to look like us. I thought there was a large amount of human chauvinism.”
Sagan admitted he liked the picture—at least, the “11-year-old” in him did. But he felt the movie could have done a better job depicting scientific accuracy without compromising its entertainment value. “All you have to do is hire one impoverished graduate student to get all the facts right,” he said.
Seems to still apply.
14 Likes
I’m not sure, though I doubt it’s “Bene Jesuit”. What’s more off-putting is his mispronunciation of English words like “diaspora” (which he actually went to the trouble of looking up in the dictionary).
Enough of my de-rail, though. On to Dune goodness…
2 Likes
Yeah. In his more personal videos, he talks a lot about being a reader from an early age, so I’m not surprised he gets a word wrong here and there.
1 Like
The known Universe of Dune isn’t populated with intelligent non-human life like the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises (aside from the sandworms I don’t recall the Dune books I read mentioning any alien life at all) so I’m not sure the “human chauvinism” critique still applies.
As for the white people thing, I wonder how much of that comes from the source text vs. the casting choices for the movies. Certainly the story would make at least as much sense if the Atreides family looked like Arabs.
4 Likes
No, he’s a real person. He just says words in a strange way. You can look up his other videos. I think it comes down to him trying to focus on a dramatic reading mixed with a script and not really doing that well. It’s hard to do that kind of stuff like voice acting or acting in general to be quite honest.
2 Likes
Odd to see Quinn linked here. Guess it’s just good content gets shared.
Personally I would start with his Ultimate Guide To Dune.
if you can also ignore all the mispronunciations
Sorry, Not Sorry that speech impediments exists. There are excellent video essayists that have speech impediments.
Here is a another great SF video essayist. He is more focused on ideas then any particular fiction.
In the audiobook series (which are very well done), Bene Gesserit is pronounced:
Bennie (as in the song “Bennie and the Jets”)
Jess-er-it (like Jess as is Jessie)
3 Likes
It’s a hard ‘g’, as in gif.
/running away now
21 Likes
Thanks. I saw it’s coming, I’ve never seen/read Dune but I always heard people rave about it…it seems just a bit out of my normal sci fi content type.
