Lost in Space

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7.9 (17)
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Lost in Space
Faneditor Name:
Original Movie Title:
Fanedit Type:
Original Release Date:
1998
Original Running Time:
130
Fanedit Release Date:
Fanedit Running Time:
91
Time Cut:
39
Brief Synopsis:
The main goal was simply to remove Blarp from the film. Never before has there been a character so supremely annoying, and utterly inconsequential to the plot. At least Jar Jar Binks and Ruby Rhod actually contributed to their stories. Blarp just screeches a lot. And on top of all that, it’s very mediocre (sometimes downright horrid) CGI.
Intention:
The main goal was simply to remove Blarp from the film. Never before has there been a character (and I use the term loosely) so supremely annoying, and utterly inconsequential to the plot. At least Jar Jar Binks and Ruby Rhod actually contributed to their stories. Blarp just screeches a lot. And on top of all that, it’s very mediocre (sometimes downright horrid) CGI.
Release Information:
  • DVD
  • Digital
Special Features
A compilation of several cut scenes, the season 3 opening credits of the TV show remade with the film actors, and an edit of the film’s original teaser (now devoid of any shots that aren’t in the fan edit).
Cuts and Additions:

Numerous, including but not limited to:
Removed John Robinson’s opening voiceover. It doesn’t tell us anything necessary that we don’t learn in watching the film. I’m not a fan of redundant voiceovers.
Advanced the original on-screen date (2058) by one hundred years. I know it’s a minor quibble, but the Earth presented here is far too advanced to be only fifty years away, in my opinion.
Slimmed down entire opening sequence, removing all of the West/Jeb jokes and so-called “cool lines” and any shots of the GenTechs inside their ships.
Removed both of the early scenes with the Robinsons at home. The only real information we get from them is that Penny is not happy to be leaving, and that Will feels ignored by his father. Both of these points will be covered ad nauseam during the course of the film.
Removed Smith’s constant prattle when reprogramming the Robot. “Sleeping behemoth”, “Steely centurion”, “Platinum-plated pal”â€�I know this is how the TV Smith often spoke, but there’s no need to cram so many into such a short space of time.
Removed Operative contacting Smith via hologram for the second time. It’s goofy, there’s the stupid, “I told you never to call me here” joke, and it’s not needed for us to figure out that Smith was betrayed by the Global Sedition for demanding more money. And even without that supposition, all we really need to know is that Smith’s device short-circuits, rendering him unconscious.
Removed West hitting on Judy just before she goes into cryosleep. The West/Judy dynamic is very forced, with no real chemistry between the characters. So most of it is now gone.
Removed Maureen berating Smith over his sabotage, and Smith’s verbose response.
Removed Smith’s puns, “Put a little heart into it” and “The life you save may be my own.”
Removed the frozen time during hyper-jump.
Removed scene where Judy removes West’s flight suit, and they discuss his tattoo.
Removed Penny recording her log, and then lamely flirting with West.
Removed Smith’s, “Evil knows evil.” There are far too many instances of self-conscious dialogue for my liking in this film, so I have removed several cases of people talking to themselves at the ends of scenes.
Removed scene of the crew finding Blarp. I won’t bother listing all the subsequent Blarp removals, there’s way too many. You can play “Where’s Waldo” for the two remaining Blarp shots if you have a keen eye. Hopefully, neither of them is obvious. My hope is that if you’d not already seen the film, you wouldn’t realise that yellow bastard ever existed.
Removed West’s first shot bouncing off of a spider. Every single other laser shot damages the spiders, so this one is a bit of an oddity.
Removed Will’s observation, “They eat their wounded.”
Removed West’s rant about wanting a can of Raid.
When the spider is on top of West, you can see him fire his gun, but no sound effect is present. Now fixed.
Removed firing the faulty torpedos at the swarm of spiders. The excuse given as to why they don’t work makes no sense, and it’s really only here to set up something later on in the film which I have also removed anyway.
Removed West’s stupidity over the speed of the Proteus explosion, and the odd reverse motion shot of Maureen sitting back in her chair. (I’m guessing it was supposed to indicate some kind of force-field seatbelt, but who the hell knows?)
The sequence in the film where the Jupiter 2 crashes is a weird jumble. Many of the shots are out of order, and the ship is suddenly facing the wrong way at the end of it all. I have re-ordered the shots to be in what appears to be the correct sequence, and have also removed the “Temple of Doom” double crash.
Removed Maureen’s line about a pissing contest.
Removed Maureen’s line to herself, “DÃ�tente’s a beautiful thing.”
Removed Smith talking to himself after his argument with West.
Removed West trying yet again to hit on Judy, and the entire Bugs Bunny/Porky Pig conversation.
Removed the terrible effects shot pullback from West closing the blast-shield, which also removes the gag with the Waltons-esque goodnight.
Removed yet another scene of West hitting on Judy. Jeez Louise, enough already.
Removed all reference to Will incorporating his personality into the Robot.
Removed the Robot telling a joke.
Removed Will’s line to Smith, “I told you we could into the bubble this way.” The bubble is gigantic, and they get to it by walking in a straight line. Yeah, Will must be a genius to figure out a way in. Sigh.
Removed Will’s terribly delivered line, “We can always go back.” (If only I could take out all of his bad acting. If I did, there’d be very little of him left in the film.)
Removed the first scene of Smith and Will discovering the alternate Jupiter 2. The “Oh shit” joke isn’t funny, and without it the scene has no point, soâ€�
Originally, when Smith and Will catch up to John and West, Smith somehow knows all about the adult Will and the time machine without any explanation. To fix this, I’ve moved the scene of Smith and Will approaching the Alt-Jupiter to earlier in the film, so that Smith can get to the ship in time to conceivably eavesdrop on all of the necessary exposition.
Removed Smith telling West, “It’s a time machine, you idiot.” I have no idea why the line is there. West was present for all the explaining a moment earlier. It’s like they just wanted to remind the audience in case they forgot in the last two minutes.
Removed some more of Smith’s prattle to the Robot.
Removed the looped line of Will saying, “Dad, it’s Doctor Smith!” Thanks, Exposition Lad!
Removed Spider-Smith’s line, “I never liked me anyway.”
Removed Will’s lines about “Every living thing has a heartâ€�” and fixed a little bit of odd continuity with the Robot removing the control device.
Removed West saying, “We don’t the have trackers to find our way back.” This line is actually from a deleted subplot involving multiple portals/time periods, which has lazily been left in the film. Judy firing the torpedos to signal West is also part of this subplot, and has been removed too.
Removed West telling Judy that he is going to get a tattoo of her name.
Removed all of the “Spider-Smith as bad guy” material. The CGI is terrible, and the story point is ridiculous. I think everyone comes out looking a lot better for not having to bother with this attempt to have a big finale villain. As it is now, John gets back to adult Will just in time to see the Jupiter taking off. Spider-Smith is still up in the upper levels, where we last saw him headed.
Removed adult Will’s final line, which they somehow were able to hear after the portal has closed.
Removed the final part of the tedious West and Judy pairing.
Restructured the end credits scroll to remove references to Blarp, (or Blawp, as they spell it here) Porky, Bugs, and Daffy. The music used is the Apollo 440 remix of the season 3 theme, but I have removed all of the dialogue samples. (Apart from being obnoxious, over half of them are no longer in this edit of the film.)
Cover art by Uncanny Antman (DOWNLOAD HERE)
image

User reviews

17 reviews
 
29%
 
59%
 
12%
3-5 stars
 
0%
1-3 stars
 
0%
Overall rating
 
7.9
Audio/Video Quality
 
8.5(2)
Audio Editing
 
8.0(1)
Visual Editing
 
9.0(2)
Narrative
 
6.0(1)
Enjoyment
 
8.0(17)
View all user reviews View most helpful
Overall rating
 
7.8
Audio/Video Quality
 
7.0
Audio Editing
 
8.0
Visual Editing
 
8.0
Narrative
 
6.0
Enjoyment
 
10.0
I've been waiting nearly two years to watch this edit, actually. Back in 2013 when I originally found it, this one jumped to the top of my "must watch" list, but unfortunately the files were offline. I messaged Uncanny Antman, but sadly he didn't have it online at that time.

Fast forward to now, I checked again, and he had it up finally! This film has always been one of my childhood favorites, despite it's overall poor quality. It's just fun to watch, cheesy one-liners and all, but I wanted to see a "better" version if possible. UA definitely delivers here, with a few caveats.

==Audio/Video Quality==
First off, the A/V quality is not pristine, definitely worse than the DVD, although it's passable and looked mostly okay on my HDTV, streamed from my laptop via HDMI. Some other viewers may be more discriminating, personally I don't mind too much. My wife did complain the audio sounded "metallic" or thin, and I noticed several volume fluctuations that are not in the original film. Turning off the "TruSurround" and "TruVolume" (audio compression) features on my TV helped, but not completely.

==Visual Editing==
I would say probably about 75% of the visual editing on the film was transparent. That could just be me; I have this curse where I remember scene timings almost perfectly, so any changes can be jarring. I'm harder to please in that regard, other viewers might be more forgiving. There are definitely more hard cuts and lost continuity near the end of the film, as the editing seems to get heavier, but for the most part it's okay. Some of the fixed continuity (like the ship crashing or the robot overcoming the control module) are subtle welcome changes.

==Audio Editing==
Aside from the overall quality issues above, the audio editing is fine. I noticed few or no hard cuts, and only a few moments where dialog or music was mixxed "off" from the original, but no game-breakers. I loved the removal of the redundant opening narration (in fact, that would have been my first change even before I knew of this edit). A sticking point for me is Jeb's weird-sounding, loudly-mixed voice compared to West's more natural one in the opening dogfight scene. That's the way it is in the original, but without the original edit's introductory line, his new first words ("That's not standard procedure, Don") are EXTREMELY annoying in the mix. The volume should have been at least halved on his lines, IMO.

==Narrative==
First, the good. Blarp is gone. Judy♥West is gone. Penny>West is gone. Penny vs. Parents is gone. None of those are missed in the slightest. Penny's character is very much strengthened by this, specifically. She seems competent and valiantly suffering instead of whiny and annoying. Also, Smith is darker and more dangerous, much less the "hee hee so evul" he was in the original script. These points are VERY heavy and weigh very much in the films favor against the big negatives below.

For the bad: Judy seems unimportant past the first 1/3 of the film, which sadly shows how little she meant in the script besides a love interest for West. This, I think, is a failing of the original script and is not really possible to fix.

A couple plot holes, one small and one major: Will goes to visit Doctor Smith, with no reason. I know the scene was trimmed to remove the robot's stupid "why did x cross the road" joke, but it leaves out that Will heard the tapping morse-code interpreted by the robot. That could possibly have been rearranged and rolled into the previous scene where he boots the robot up initially? The timeline isn't strict; that scene could take place almost any time after John/West leave the ship. Another example from this same scene would be Will talking Doctor Smith with the pistol before they sneak off the ship; the beginning of the conversation is cut and there's no apparent reason for Smith to raise his hands say "William, you misjudge me!" except that the child happens to be holding a gun, and non-threateningly at that.

There's also a lot lost in the ending without the John vs. Spider!Smith battle, cheesy as it was. Spider!Smith shows up and is obviously evil, but then does absolutely NOTHING after threatening to kill John, Will, and West. John escapes the robot and comes back. Why would Spider!Smith let that go? He just disappears. We also lose closure to the earlier "kill the man/become the monster" exchange between John and Smith, and Future!Will isn't saved by his father, making his altruistic "you go instead of me" moment feel empty and abrupt in light of his earlier angry "my father's not coming to the rescue" moment.

==Enjoyment==
I loved the removal of characters who talk to themselves at the end of scenes. Worked excellently and changed the tone of the film significantly. My wife mentioned "it's more intense" without the self-aware moments. The stated goal of "removing blarp" was executed PERFECTLY; I didn't miss that little horror for a single moment. Most of the other cuts made sense, although I think overall it was a little heavy-handed for my liking.

A bit of the "witty banter" could have been kept, IMO. For example, Will's line; "Can we cut back on her oxygen so she's not quite as annoying when she wakes up?" cuts way too early and makes him seem overly jerkish. Penny's rejoinder "Does he have to wake up at all?" and Maureen's tongue-in-cheek "I'll turn this spaceship right around" follow-up are integral to that exchange. It enhances the family dynamic a little and feels like good old familial teasing, not mean-spirited snarking like some of Penny's earlier cut scenes. Even so, the edit does not suffer much from the loss of things like this; I just miss some of it due to nostalgia.

Ultimately, I'm willing to overlook the two plot points mentioned above. The film as a whole wasn't very strong on the narrative to begin with. I just think more could have been done to fix those two parts. They didn't affect my overall enjoyment, hence the 10/10 rating there.

Overall, I think this was an excellent edit considering the limited source material. Nitpicks aside, and my wife and I both highly enjoyed it. Definitely keeping this one around for the family.

User Review

Do you recommend this edit?
Yes
Format Watched?
Digital
C
1 reviews
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(Updated: September 17, 2012)
Enjoyment
 
8.0
Review by zeroxdash — December 4, 2011 @ 9:24 am

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(Updated: September 17, 2012)
Enjoyment
 
9.0
Review by steelio2006 — June 21, 2011 @ 3:27 pm

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(Updated: September 17, 2012)
Enjoyment
 
7.0
Review by juk — October 16, 2010 @ 5:27 am

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(Updated: September 17, 2012)
Enjoyment
 
7.0
Review by Hrumpff — April 12, 2010 @ 4:36 pm

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