Frank Herbert’s Dune is one of the all-time classic science fiction novels. The densely packed story set thousands of years in the future has it all – palace intrigue, holy war, feudal politics, even drug addiction if you read between the lines about that precious spice. It spawned several sequels written by Herbert, and is now a continuing franchise overseen by his son.

The 1984 David Lynch film tried to tackle the book, but it was an abysmal critical and box office dud that outraged fans of the novel. So much so that Lynch took his name off the film. It wasn’t that bad of a movie, but its inability to live up to its own hype made its failure that much more complete.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that another filmmaker tried to make a film adaptation of Dune back in the 1970s.

Alejandro Jodorowsky was known for avant garde movies like El Topo and The Holy Mountain. But he had a vision for Herbert’s masterpiece, and he fought for years to get it made.

His dream cast included Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen, Salvador Dali as the Emperor, along with David Carradine and Mick Jagger (presumably as Paul Atreides and Feyd Rautha). He wanted Pink Floyd to do the soundtrack. And he hired H.R. Giger and Moebius, the men who later designed Alien, to design the sets and spaceships.

It could have been magnificent. It could have also been a casserole of madness. We’ll never know. Jodorowsky couldn’t get financing for his film. Studios thought it was just too weird. Some claim that if Jodorowsky had made Dune and failed, Star Wars might never have been made.

Take a look at the stunning documentary Jodorowky’s Dune to get a glimpse of what he had in mind. It includes interviews and a lot of images of the designs that Moebius and Giger conjured up.