The thing I find appealing about Dune is how WEIRD it is. There's depth too, but it's weird and it really lends itself to all sort of styles and IMO they all kinda work.
I’ve started showing my kids, Herculoids, thundar the barbarian, he-man, and other sorts of just really weird old cartoons. There’s not a lot today that’s being produced. That’s just fun and weird and gets the creative juices going. There are a few weird kids books too like the skull and the queen in the cave that I highly recommend.
Culture quickly defined by what has already been created could definitely use a shot of weird injected.
My preschooler enjoyed Du Iz Tak? by Carson Ellis. The characters are insects who talk in an unintelligible language.
On the less weird, but still interesting side there's what's known to English speakers as Adventure Box - it's a translated version of the French monthly magazine J'aime lire which is published since 1977.
Back in the old days authors didn't know how anything worked and there was no Internet to look things up and no budget to do research so they were forced to make a lot of the stuff up on the spot. In retrospect a lot of those choices were weird and often blatantly unscientific, but they worked in context.
I sometimes wonder what He-Man would have been like if they had spent more than 5 seconds coming up with character names and concepts. The whole universe feels like a rough draft/outline where someone went "we're out of budget, this goes into production as is."
