Star Wars - Episode I: The Ridiculous Menace

Review by Sunarep — May 19, 2012 @ 2:00 pm

What a beast! This is probably the fanedit with the most cuts and tweaks probably trumping War of the Stars Part II – so a fair share of work has been put into this edit.

Unfortunately it didn’t really click with me. The central gag is pretty much characters saying lines that they don’t say during that time of the movie, with looped looks implying awkwardness – same lines are repeated over again and there is only so much “now there are two of them” that i can take. While the line itself is pretty dumb the entertainment comes from the fact that dialog like this was written for a Star Wars movie. It kinda grieves you knowing that those things have been put into something you liked. And those bad lines have become a running gag amongst Star Wars fans, leaving us wondering what the hell Lucas was smoking when he came up with the script.
But repeating the same line over and over again didn’t really add to my amusement.

There are some funny bits like the nintendo fight between darth maul and Obi Wan but for me there were too little gems like this. The rest was mostly a compilation of youtube videos interrupted by “what” “now there are two of them” and any line by Ric Olie.

I think this edit might have been better as a sort of compilation with only the best bits and pieces, to sort out the scenes that work and those where there is just silence “what” and “angel”
People have already referenced “Darth Vader being a jerk” and said Nintendo battle is pretty much like this, a fun short clip where something in star wars is not happening like it should. Still stretching those gags over two hours is just too long IMO.

I hate to sound so negative – especially knowing how much work has been put into this and how many people have collaborated for this idea – but at the end of the day I can only talk about my enjoyment and not how much others liked it.

4/10

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.

Just to echo what others have said I found a lot of the gags to be unfunny though comedy is a selective taste. The consent choppy to the dialogue soon became annoying to the point I just wanted the Phantom Menace instead. While the Phantom Menace was lacking in plot the edit to me removed any and all story, if I’d never seen the Phantom Menace before I wouldn’t had a clue what was going on and who was who.

There are some great moments within the edit the pod race, Yoda snoring and Darth Maul’s walking on sunshine sketch are among the highlights though for every gag that worked I found there to be 10 gags that didn’t work.

The end credits are also a highlight as it shows the number people that have contributed to this edit. TV’s Frink really captured something special and it’s great that the fanedit community were able to help in contributing towards the edit. I also see this as the first of many edits that spoofs a well known film.

Overall it’s worth seeing though I don’t have any desire to watch it again, would have preferred a more shorter 80min film instead as I found it to be a bit of drag 5/10

Review from 1 January 2012

Sorry, just didn’t work for me. I admire the idea and even the execution, but I really couldn’t get into it, however much I wanted to.
The repeating clips I found particularly unfunny, and the constant (unavoidable?) cuts made it very difficult to follow the movie and to understand the (new) motivations of the characters.
A lot of it didn’t make sense to me – like Anni saying “are you an angel” to everyone. Is he retarded?
Also, the cuts were a bit too long, so everything seemed very slow. Cutting fast to the next dialogue would really have helped keep up the tempo.

I did like:
the video game sounds entering the Gungan city
the Darth Vader voice out of Anni
the new subtitles
the video game health bar in the final fight
“Obi Wan”

but, unfortunately I was really bored: Phantom is boring anyway – A new hope may have been better to do this with since the humour doesn’t have to carry the entire film.

I very much uhmmed and ahhed about writing this review because I really like Frink on the forums and felt like I was being somehow disloyal. Then I realised that this is a rating site, and some people LOVE certain movies, and others don’t, and people have different tastes and some people might find this review helpful.
Don’t take it personally Frink. Didn’t work for me, but others loved it. It certainly shows that we can expect more from Frink in the future. For what it’s worth, Congrats on your first edit!

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