Star Wars - Episode I: The Ridiculous Menace

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.

Review by DwightFry78 — January 20, 2012 @ 5:31 am

*This rating was given before reviews were required*

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 by blueyoda — January 2, 2012 @ 6:08 am

I’m sorry to say that this didn’t work out for me. Like everybody else I was extremely hyped to see this but I ended up disappointed; perhaps I over-hyped myself and expected another War of the Stars but most of the jokes fell flat and I found it difficult to finish the fanedit, frequently checking my watch.

The most difficult part was the audio editing, specifically the dialog; Frink reconstructed the dialog in almost every scene to tell a new story. It’s a great idea but one that’s better on paper; I guess Frink did the best he could to blend everything together and while the result is in theory funny, in practice it makes it difficult to follow the story and it completely pulled me out of the movie. Which is a shame because it’s obvious that a lot of work went into this.

The other thing I found obnoxious was the repetitive nature of a lot of the jokes; many were based on characters interrupting each other and being rude. It was funny once or twice; repeated all over the edit it was predictable and unfunny.

Some of the jokes did hit their mark and made me laugh but they were buried underneath too much choppy sound editing and too many repetitive or awkward humor. The entire thing felt to me like a bad Family Guy episode.

In my opinion this would have worked as a shorter fanedit; trimming the movie down to maybe an hour and only keeping the material that truly worked. But still, Frink has to be congratulated for effort alone, having changed just about every scene in the movie. For a firstling, this is truly impressive. I recommend this fanedit for die hard fans of Star Wars.

Review by booshman — June 1, 2012 @ 7:01 am

*This rating was given before reviews were required*