Years ago, I heard of what’s known as “The Phantom Edit” which deletes Jar Jar Binks from The Phantom Menace. Tonight, I stumbled on a website dedicated to fan edits (link not given because I’m sure it’ll set the Reader’s copyright alarms off) of various films. Not only do they have “The Phantom Edit,” but they have some seventy plus fan edits of the various films in the Star Wars saga. Every one of the movies has been reworked in some manner or other. In some cases, they fix technical glitches that Lucas couldn’t be bothered with (color correcting, adding improved effects to things like computer displays, etc.), in others, they correct the butchery that Lucas did to the films (i.e. Greedo shooting first), while in still more variations, they cut out scenes, characters, and Ewoks. The amount of time people have spent on these things is amazing, because it’s doubtful that many of them could have been done in a single evening. One version of A New Hope lists nearly 200 changes, which include things like recutting entire scenes to correct what the fan feels were editing mistakes. (In some of the listed cases, I’d say he was right, as he fixes some continuity errors.)
There’s also non-Star Wars films on the site which have been recut by fans. The film which comes closest to the number of variations that Star Wars has is Superman, and that’s only 12. It boggles the mind. I would have thought that Star Trek would at least be close in quantity, since Trekkies/Trekkers are legendary in their obsession over the series, but it has only seven.
I once viewed a really fun edit of Episode I. What the editor did was replace all of Jar Jar’s lines with some made up language and then added subtitles so that he was no longer comic relief.
I wish I could remember some of the new dialog, but I vaguely recall the scene in his hometown as being that of a returning hero, not an outcast.
The Phantom Edit was the one that got all the attention, but there have since been better edits done of the entire series. I have all 6 DVDs of one of the later fan edits (I can’t recall the name of the editor offhand), and those are the ones I reach for when I want to watch Star Wars, because frankly they’re more enjoyable than the original edits. All of the whiny Anakin/Padme/Luke whining crap is gone, Jar-Jar and the Gungans have been subtitled and dubbed into alien languages to make them less retarded, and there are some tighter technical edits. I also have fan edits of all 3 Spider-Man movies which make them actually bearable to watch. I haven’t yet watched them, but there’s an edit call The Matrix: Dezionized which takes the whole trilogy and makes it one three hour movie that’s supposed to be entertaining without hurting your brain or make you want to throw beer bottles at the screen.
Looking through that site, there’s so many to choose from, I’d like to spend my bandwidth on the “right” versions. Can you look up which ones you have so I can grab them too?