Star Wars - Episode I: The Ridiculous Menace

Review by LastSurvivor — December 28, 2011 @ 12:05 pm

*This rating was given before reviews were required*

Review by TMBTM — December 24, 2011 @ 6:02 pm

First I was afraid (petrified?) to not like this edit for the same reason some people did not quite like my War of the Stars edit: jarring sound editing at parts. Bad audio cuts, even if obviously intentionals are difficult to handle, even more than bad video cuts. I saw various “in the making” little previews of this edit and I thought: those are fun, but could they stand the long run of a feature movie? I’m glad to say that, to me, the answer is yes.

L8wrtr said pretty much what I think about Ridiculous Menace in his review so I won’t say much more.
There was rarely more than 2 or 3 minutes without a real good laugh, and I have to say that English is not my first language (but if you know those movies you know already pretty much all the lines used here. They are just twisted upside down) and I think I missed a very few amount of jokes.

Some repetitive gags are a bit too long, indeed, (senat and Obi falling from the platforms comes to mind), but I have to say that the pod race was maybe one of the highlight of the edit to me. So I guess humor is a strange thing ;) Many characters motivations are changed in this edit (Qui-Gon on Tatooine was genius) and it really felt like a new ride.

I also think that all the work Frink did on his cutlists for a lot of other prequels fanedits helped him a lot to have in mind all the lines and all the potential ridiculousness of the scenes.

All in all it was a very refreshing way to watch this movie (again…) 9/10 from me.

First I thought about a 8/10 rating because of the audio editing, but really, the amount of laugh during the viewing was too high, it needed an extra point.

PS: please find a way to bring back Rick Olié for the sequel! He was a great help understanding some key scenes ;)

Review by QuickCut — January 18, 2012 @ 5:43 am

I haven’t laughed this hard all year.

Technical quality – 10/10 – audio and video were both fine.

Presentation – 10/10 – nice menu, nice cover art.

Editing – 7/10 – the video editing was flawless and just the fact that you merged all those different scenes and audio clips was incredible. I took off a couple points because the audio editing was so horrible, but you can’t really work around that.

Entertainment – 9/10 – I couldn’t stop laughing. The only non-hilarious parts were a few scenes on Coruscant and some of the ending battle. The rest of it was side-splitting. So many funny jokes. Sometimes they got repetitive but still. This was insanely funny. The soundtrack, the dubbing, the yippees, the podrace, the angel jokes, the droids, the video game health bars, Anakin’s father, the list goes on and on and on. So hilarious. I’ll definitely be recommending this one. Would have gotten a point higher if you had somehow been able to make the audio editing a bit smoother.

Overall – 8/10

This has such good ideas in it. This movie was frankly ridiculous, so to just turn it into a full on joke was a great idea. I laughed many times in this edit. The level of repetition worked most of the time for me. I had a lot of fun watching this edit and would recommend it.

This movie is so funny it made me fall over my self, everyone I showed it to was instantly hooked. Apart from it being really funny, I also truly believe that this is the ultimate version of this movie. TV'sFrink does great work with creatively reshaping this movie into a more consistent tone.
Face it people, Jar-Jar is not the problem with the prequels, he is only the catalyst of hate/dread for otherwise bad movies. I have seen other prequel edits who try to clean up the movies and make them more serious in tone, this doesn't work for me at all, they only make dry movies even more lifeless. They approoched these movies with totally the wrong mindset, don't do away with the humor, increase it!
This edit on the other hand may very well be closer to the original vision and I immensely enjoy it. Am I implying that GL would be better of making space balls at this point? Yes I very well may be.