Star Wars - Episode I: The Ridiculous Menace

Apparently, I've rated this before. Now there are two of them.

Thus begins the Ridiculous trilogy. Off to a nice start! I'm always happy when editors take and implement our suggestions. They don't have to, of course, but it's great when they're willing to listen, as many minds can make a superior product in some cases. I could've done without some of it, but then, it's not my edit. (not crazy about some of the repetition and internet culture stuff, seeing as I'm not a 12-year-old girl) There is also some stuff that I thought was brilliantly done, both straight from Frink's damaged brain and from contributors.

The audio and video are quite good for the most part. I thought some things could've been taken a step further (I would have really tried to do more with pitch changes, even if it didn't seeeeeem to work upon initial tries), but overall, with this type of edit, it's about as good as it can get.

Overall, a must see. It's sort of a 'love it or hate it' type of movie now (like Kung Pow, for instance), as opposed to the 'hate it' movie it was as-is, but I would definitely recommend that every Star Wars fan check this out. You may even begin to—*gasp*—LIKE The Phantom Menace! At least a bit...

January 1, 2012

Original review:

I’m very sorry to say but I really didn’t enjoy this one (but I really really really wanted to). It felt way too long and the majority of the humor didn’t make me laugh. There were some great parts in it, without a doubt, but on the whole it fell flat. The editing was very choppy a lot of the time. And while I understand that it wasn’t intended to be a masterpiece of editing, all the harsh audio cuts ended up taking me out of the edit too often.

But, the parts that did make me laugh were great. Specifically “The Distance”, the lines from “Airplane”, a lot of the subtitle jokes and Bender’s dialog made me LOL, ROFL, PSML and ROFLcopter (respectively).

Expanded Review:

A/V QUALITY. It's fine. 9/10

VIDEO EDITING. Twas good. 10/10

AUDIO EDITING. In almost every scene new dialog is created for the characters, more so for Qui-Gonn and Obi-Wan. Frink lifted bits and pieces of dialog from a lot of different sources and to me it got to be quite annoying pretty quick. I understand that this was done to create a lot of humorous dialog and for most people they didn’t mind the harsh cuts in audio. But the cuts stood out too often for me to overlook them. I would give the audio editing a 2/10 because of all of abrupt cutting. For future edits I feel that if the audio cuts were smoother I would enjoy it more.

NARRATIVE. Phantom Menace's plot sucks, but this was an improvement to be honest.

ENTERTAINMENT. This is another polarizing aspect of this edit in my opinion. Firstly, let me state that humor is mainly subjective. I don’t think anybody (or anything) can be universally funny. Some people may love a certain joke and some may hate it. That being said, the humor was very much hit-and-miss for me. Many jokes did not make me laugh. I felt that the entire edit was too long for my tastes and that it would have worked a lot better without so many repetitive jokes. I give the entertainment value a 4/10 due to how many of the jokes weren’t funny for me and I got bored too easily. I’m sorry, but the stuff that made me laugh couldn’t outweigh everything else.

I’m not going to give the DVD presentation a rating. It looked fine, but to me how good the DVD menus are doesn’t affect how I feel about the rating itself.

In the end, I will say that I know how much work Frink put into this edit and I do not want him to feel that I am attacking him. I know how it feels to be criticized harshly and I really don’t want one bad review to spoil all the positive ones. A lot of people loved the hell out of this edit and for that Frink should be commended.

Review from January 2 2012

I’m afraid I’m in the boat with those who thought this idea was probably better on paper than in reality. The video editing was great (I enjoyed the funny transitions/wipes etc), but the audio editing was far too choppy for me. I also found the laughs were few and far between, even though I was able to appreciate the effort that went into this grand production.

It’s clear the film was intended to be in the vein of funny youtube clips like “Vader being an ass” where he keeps closing his ‘pod’… Many of the jokes felt like they were trying to replicate this style of humour. But trying to stretch this concept out over a whole film was hard to watch. Some of the humour works well, but for me, the majority felt forced and fell flat, particularly due to the hard audio cuts.

If this had been released as a series of funny clips from episode 1, just taking the funniest scenes as ‘skits’, I think it would have worked better than trying to thread a whole movie together. But for originality and the immense creativity and effort required to put this whole thing together, drawing individual lines, songs and sounds from so many different sources, credit is certainly due.

Ever since The Phantom Menace was released in 1999, many fan editors (including myself) have sought far and wide to create the perfect edit of Episode I. Many have fought to fix the flaws and inconsistencies of the film, and some have even gone to the far ends of the earth to make just a simple line sing.

And then there's this edit.

TV's Frink's The Ridiculous Menace is the Airplane! of Star Wars fanedits! There is no oscar-worthy stuff here. There is no deep, brilliant or thought-provoking stuff going on. It's only purpose is to get you to laugh to the point where it hurts. And laugh I did! I laughed during the opening credits! I laughed at the constant repetition of lines and the constantly altered dialogue! I laughed at the extending of the films worst moments and the destruction of the film's best moments! I laughed!

If you're looking for the perfect edit of Episode I, see l8wrtr's edit or HAL9000's edit, or better yet, see my edit, because I'm a shameless self-promoter! But if you're looking for an uproariously good time, and a nice little primer on how NOT to fix Episode I, see The Ridiculous Menace and enjoy how phenomenally insane this edit can get!

Now, if I could only get my hands on Episode II....

Bloody hilarious. Editing isn't seamless, but nor would you expect it to be. Many things throughout are a testament to Frinks skill as an editor, even if the audio makes you question it. Bottom line is: this is very, very funny.

Favourite moments: Qui-gon trolling people with the comm,and Obi-Wan misjudging the jump during the Maul battle. Priceless. Oh, and replacing "force" with "wookies"? Love it.