OK, good, I got that posted before anyone scooped me.
Some thoughts....
I read back in this thread from about this time last year. It's amazing it's been a full year since the first trailer dropped, and now my anticipation will build that the debut is only three months away. Now it's time to start thing about my debut night menu, to riff off a comment I made last year.
Lindir, did you ever finish reading? Did you read just the first book, or several? How did you like what you read?
It's pretty obvious from the trailer that they have changed some things. I won't say anything I consider too spoilerish, but if you want to be completely unspoiled in how the series compares to the books, look away now.
Brother Day (Lee Pace, with his magnificent voice) is indeed the Emperor, or rather, the co-emperor with his younger and older clone "brothers." In the books, the emperors were not clones. It was just like any Earth monarchy. You're succeeded by your child, or sometimes the rule passes to a different house. From the articles I read, these clone emperors are of the house of Cleon. In the books, Cleon was the emperor during the period of the Foundation prequels. He was good natured but a bit ineffectual IIRC. The dialog in the trailer makes it sound like the Empire is only 400 years old. If that's the case, that's a big change from the books, where the Empire is 12,000 years old. I hope they are not going in for some Peter Jackson-style timeline compression.
In one of my earlier posts, I said I'd read something in a reddit thread where someone stated Apple only had the rights to the original trilogy. I think this is now demonstrably false (or Apple disregarded rights), as Alfred Enoch ("Dean Thomas" from Harry Potter) is in it and is being described as playing Raych, a character who appears only in the prequels (but who could logically be inserted into this story...there's enough timeline overlap).
I think the visuals look
stunning...though that one black hole (or whatever it is) scene still looks little better than pre-viz.
They are going to show the first three episodes back to back on Sept. 24 then drop one a week. My big question to myself is whether I will be able to wait till the whole thing has aired and then binge it, or whether I will watch each week.
So at this point, I think we are nearly out of the vaporware phase. Of course, it could still end up vaporware (sometimes things get shelved), or it could come out and be lousy. But I am definitely getting drawn in by the trailers. My hope is that they have enough humility to recognize that when you're adapting one of the towering epics of sci-fi, you need to be respectful.
Which brings up another interesting thing...who would have thought that the two towering epics of all of sci fi literature, Foundation and Dune, would hit screens within a month of each other?