Star Wars - Episode I: The Ridiculous Menace

Review by Captain Khajiit — December 24, 2011 @ 5:50 pm

The nature of the edit is sufficiently well established from previous reviews not to need reiterating. In essence, L8wrtr’s thoughts, both positive and negative, mirror my own, though I rather like the podrace. Video and audio quality are good, save where they are not meant to be. The presentation fits the edit well — especially the main menu — though it would be nice to see TV’s Frink have a go at his own cover art at some point.

This receives nine stars out of ten from me too. Well done, Frink!

Review by L8wrtr — December 23, 2011 @ 8:43 pm

The most fanedited movie of them all gets a completely new approach.

At the time of this writing, The Ridiculous Menace is the 16th fanedit of The Phantom Menace that is listed on FE. It is certainly not going to be the last either. But it is the most unique of them all. Where other edits seek to create something better than the original, something that makes it more ‘Star Wars’ in tone, feel and narrative, this edit says “Yippee!!!” and to hell with that.

This edit will not be for everyone. Audiophiles who demand clear and unambiguous sound will cringe at the sometimes choppy dialog with stray and unrelated background elements. If your brain cannot accept this audio aspect, then sadly I have to recommend skipping this. And that’s a shame because this edit stands out as one of the most unique, bold, and entertaining fanedits around. In the pantheon of spectacular Star Wars fanedits, for me this edit has its place up there with The War of the Stars, and A New Hope Revisited.

About the edit itself. What makes this edit a both a joy as well as an amazing achievement is that it is not simply a collection of cheap gags and isolated laughs, strung together against the backdrop of The Phantom Menace. While there certainly are numerous individual jokes, gags and meme-insertions, the true accomplishment of this edit is that Frink has created several new sub-plots and redefined most of the characters. Like a master comedian, Frink consistently introduces something funny, something that by itself is entertaining and funny. Then he builds on it, re-uses the core of the joke, adds to it and then punctuates it later in the edit, where the final joke is not possible or nearly as funny without the build-up beforehand.

To be fair, I do not love everything about this edit. There are some jokes which, like a Saturday Night Live sketch from the 90s, go on far too long. In particular the Pod Race and Senate sequences both come to mind. The jokes in them are good, but the pacing is long and too repetitive, causing the pacing to slow way down. However those hiccups are very few, and even with the slowed down pace, remain funny and entertaining.

As I said before, in the world of Star Wars fanedits, this has a place as one of my absolute favorites. Completely original, bold, ridiculous.

Overall, I cannot recommend this edit enough. The only thing holding it back from a perfect score are the pacing issues. This get’s a 9 out of 10 Yippees!!!!

Review by Brumous — December 23, 2011 @ 1:15 am

Witness the amazing TV’s Frink as he slices, dices and chops like Bart Simpson with a Ginsu knife. The Ridiculous Menace is a gleeful and manic spoof, a kind of comedic vandalism equivalent to drawing mustaches on somber portraits and throwing cream pies at stuffy politicians. The pomp and dreadful pretentiousness of the original movie is unceremoniously deflated through radical alteration of the personalities and motives of all characters, major and minor. Heroes become cads, villains become clowns, and just about everyone is reduced to a state of doddering cluenessness.

Often the humor builds in layers of ridiculousness until the humor reaches a level of surreality that would do Benny Hill or Monty Python proud. Other jokes fall flat or are obscure, but with the batting average so high and the pace of gags so fast and furious, it just doesn’t matter. This is one funny flick.

The video quality is adequate. Compression makes the focus soft on larger screens but it’s still quite watchable. A number of contributors have pitched in with special effects and those come off well, complementing the hacked and manipulated satiric tone.

The soundtrack has received a massive amount of changes, from new background music to new effects to new dialog. The end credits alone must have 30 different music clips! The detail of audio work goes down to individual inserted words, and this is the one area where technical flaws sometimes get in the way of enjoying the movie. Sometimes the words in a sentence are so mismatched it’s hard to understand what the character is saying. Additional audio processing and pitch shifting might help that out, but that would also mean many more months of work! So, as they say, deal with it.

DVD features are basic, with chapter selections and a few bonuses included to add a few gags. No off-color jokes and thankfully no potty humor, so the disk is suitable for children. Kudos to Frink and his many co-conspirators for assembling the funniest Star Wars Episode One ever. 9.5/10

TV's Frink has made Episode I into exactly what it was from the beginning: a joke. Due to some clever editing to pretty much everything, I found myself enjoying and even laughing aloud at what must be one of the most creative edits I have seen in a while. Let me fill you in on what I did, and didn't, like.

Pros:
-All of the droids are absolutely hilarious. Seriously. They're awesome.
-Many of the conversations are refreshingly new, and they end up being really funny.
-TV's Frink has mastered the art of elongated repetition, having the same thing being said just long enough to be really funny without being annoying. Think of the opening scene of spaceballs for an idea on how this works.
-Really, most of the jokes were just funny. That's all this edit was aiming to accomplish and it did that.

Alright, onto the the bad stuff. Don't let any of this deter you from watching this edit, because they are, very frequently, a side effect of the silliness.

Cons:
-Some of the lines TV's Frink used to create new dialogue have the background music attached to them, which is an unavoidable side effect.
-There were a couple jokes that didn't really work, but I might just not have really understood them.
-The abundance of splicing he did ended up with (sometimes-distracting) visual and audio glitches.
-The storyline was damaged... but that is not too important to the edit.

That's it. I would highly recommend this edit and would watch it again. Heck, might as well replace Episode I with this beauty.

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"