Star Wars - Episode I: The Ridiculous Menace

TV's Frink, are you an angel?
I don't know why I didn't download and watch this sooner! This is the very first time I have EVER managed to make it through any of the Star Wars prequels---and I have tried a few fanedits, and I tried to watch with Rifftrax---but none of them could make it bearable until this edit!
I could name things that didn't quite work (sometimes the repetition was too much) but most things did work! This is a particularly inspiring edit to me. It's as if you have found a new way to riff a movie! (I assume from your name, TV's Frink, that you are indeed a fan of MST3K and other incarnations.)
All the audio from Airplane! was used very VERY well, the Cake song was absolutely GREAT, and "look over there", "You catch on quick!" and of course "Now....there are 2 of them!" were all just brilliantly funny! I love all the attempted communications between Obi and Qui-gon. I had wished we could have seen the video, or parts of it, for Weird Al's "Saga Begins" instead of just the audio, but that is hardly a real complaint. I don't actually have any complaints.
In short, this works and it works really well! Like Airplane! or almost any episode of MST3K, there are hundreds of gags coming at you a mile a minute. Not every single joke lands, but its all about the percentage. And the percentage of what worked is really high! (It might help if you are too, when you watch this....)
I highly recommend this edit, and I have already downloaded the sequel and can't wait to watch it next! (This is now part of my personal top 5 list of favorite edits, alongside War of the Stars, Robots vs Kung Fu, Tears In The Rain and Riddles of the Lost Gods; I love edits that really change things a lot! This kicked ass!)

I watched this the other night. My impression:

It's a mess of a movie-edit and yet it is brilliant at the same time!

First of all, it's simply awesome to make a parody out of "Phantom Menace", the movie is pretty bad, so why not make it at least funny?

Great idea and I'm open to parodies if they are well made like "Naked gun" or "Airplane".

I think the key to a good parody is that it has heart and a comedy at its core. Most parodies fail because at its core there is no believable and relatable character and story.

You can't just cram one funny scene after the other and expect it all to work together. But this edit does just that:

Every scene is made to be funny, every frame really, and that's why it's a mess. The problem is that it doesn't gel as a whole.

So I can understand some of the harsh reviews, scenes are repeated too much to cause laughter, audio is not very smooth...

But even though it's a mess, it's also brilliant because some (not all, about half) of the ideas and humour, and there's a boat loads of it, are spot on and really make you laugh hard:

SPOILER-ALERT

1. Those trade-people always saying "Now there are two of them"
2. That Samuel Jackson, I mean Mace Windu, is constantly beeped out, the bad motherf...(shut your mouth).
3. That all the robots are talking dirty. In fact I wished they were more frivolous and I wished Mace Windu claimed to have written once a speech-code for the android's (no pun intended) operating system...
4. That Anakin despite having lost the race before he could start his engines nonetheless tries to complete the race alone, with that song "Going the distance" playing, pure brilliance!
5. That it was made look like Qui-Gon Jinn desires Anakin's mother, haha! But why did he decide then to take Anakin with him instead of her?
6. That Obi Wan misaimed his jump and came down the other side, haha!
7. That Qui-Gon Jinn wants to communicate with Obi Wan and then doesn't, great!

SPOILER-ALERT-END

So there's a lot to laugh and love in this edit, but it could be better if it was reedited to get rid of those jokes that didn't work, or gel the story and characters better.. there's a real gem here, but it needs polishing, to make all those funny jokes and good ideas work together as a movie with a comedy-heart at its core.

Still, kudos to TV's frink! I laughed quite a few times real hard and felt entertained.


P.S.: At the end I was surprised by the credits, seems like half of this fanediting-community were involved in this edit.

P.P.S.: Oh, just read in TV-Frink's signature, that there is a sequel to this, great: "Now there are two of them"

Frink has done a terrific job of completely altering the experience of watching this movie. New character traits, running gags, in-jokes, pop culture references, tons of dialogue alterations, sight gags, subtitles, sound effects - lots of effort all around. There's rarely a dull moment -that isn't a phrase that's often associated with The Phantom Menace. Not all of the gags worked for me, but the rapid fire carpet bombing approach to the humor keeps the laughs coming. Some of the visual edits are a little rough/obvious, and some of the audio has music bleed - but this only adds to the silly nature of the project. I regret not watching this in full earlier. But now, I'm on board with this, and will be eagerly watching the sequel(s!) in the near future. I catch on pretty quick!

Review by g1orkatsos — March 11, 2012 @ 3:41 am

VIDEO EDITING. Video quality was fine through the whole movie. fine quality overall. As far as video editing goes it was done quite well. 9/10

AUDIO EDITING. This is what killed the whole thing for me. By using pieces and parts of dialog from the entire movie (and not only)it turned out a big mess and got annoying very easily and quickly. The length of 117 mins didn’t help much either. I understand the reason behind this design choice, but the cuts stood out too much often and they distracted from most of the jokes the editor was trying to make. It got so tiring for me at one point that this is the only fanedit i wasn’t able to complete in one sitting. I know that there was no way around this, other people as i can see here don’t mind and i understand the amount of work that was put into this, but it was a very big issue for me. 2/10

ENTERTAINMENT. As i said i wasn’t able to complete this in one sitting. And that says a lot as i have managed to finish many very bad movies in one sitting. it wasn’t an enjoyable experience for me in the end and i was bored and annoyed of it very early on. The humor mostly failed for me. I found the vast majority of the jokes to not work and many felt repetitive and some dragged on for way more than needed. The sound issues ruined many potential jokes for me and while i found some few stuff funny here and there they weren’t at all enough to make me like this edit. The length of 117 wasn’t suitable for this kind of edit either. Maybe this could have worked as a couple of youtube clips of a few mins in length with a few selected scenes from the movie, but as one whole movie experience it was quite bad. I am really sad to say this, and i understand how much of the pain in the ass the whole creation progress must have been, but i didn’t enjoy this edit. 2/10

i gave this a 4/10 and i feel really sorry for such a low rating but i think i said my reasons for such a rating and i stand by my decision and don’t regret it. Again I understand that a lot of work was needed to make this possible, and i i don’t want TV Frink to consider this as an attack against him or anything like that. I have nothing against him, in fact congrats for getting other people to enjoy your edit and for your really good comments by some. But this edit is a Love/Hate situation and i am in the latter category. It didn’t work for me, and i hope TV Frink doesn’t take this the wrong way. But this is my honest oppinion and i stand by it.

Final Score: 4/10

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.