"Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" TV specials, interviews and commercials recorded by Ripplin throughout the spring and summer of 1999, [lovingly] transferred from VHS by none, a.k.a. %20...
...is what it is, and you can get it at tehparadox, a.b.starwars and preserv.
More info here: http://preserv.22web.net/?p=1321
I'll post the story in the NFO in the next post.
Like many others, I enjoyed the Special Editions (SE), though not entirely. There were some additions I thought were nice, but more that I thought were pointless and somewhat juvenile. I was not surprised, as we started seeing a lot of that in Return of the Jedi (ROTJ), what with the belching and Tarzan yells.
When news of The Phantom Menace (TPM) came along, I was somewhat excited (because it was Star Wars, after all!), but keeping it in check. I'm also the type that hates spoilers, and since my subscription to Star Wars Insider (SWI) magazine was turning into spoiler central, I started having to ignore it somewhat. Not fun! (Same thing happened with Jabba the Hutt in the SE with a gatefold cover they did.) But really, the marketing of the movie was so aggressive and pervasive that it eventually became nigh impossible to keep the spoilers at bay. When I got that issue of SWI with Darth Maul on the cover, that was pretty much my 'whatever, I'll just go with it' moment.
That may have been the impetus to start taping everything TPM-related on TV that I could find, often having the VCR (my faithful then-young Sharp) on standby for commercial breaks during shows I didn't even watch just because I knew that channel was playing certain ads! Lots of fluff, but there were some segments I taped that I still enjoy now, such as the Extra! report on bootlegging. Very interesting! There were also rare original trilogy clips shown here and there that I was happy to see as well.
Looking back, I don't know why I continued these taping practices after I'd seen the movie, but I did. I know that part of it was to see how many others felt as I did about it, as I knew there would be backlash segments. I walked out of the theater more confused than anything. I'm not into politics, so a movie being loaded with politics was a big strike against it for me. I admit that I still don't fully understand parts of it, though that's more down to apathy than anything. The pod race and Darth Maul were cool enough, but then there were the...midichlorians? What? And the virgin birth?! Like, gag me with a spoon! Oh, and Yoda looked ridiculous as well. And, of course, there was Jar Jar, whose presense and antics cranked up the silliness introduced in ROTJ to 11. I'm so glad that he didn't become the hip character every kid would start talking like, as Lucas intended. I'm sure many old school Star Wars fans who were now parents threatened to disown their kids if they ever uttered a line spoken by that despicable character. ;)
So, there you have it; a little history on the tape and how it was made. As 'meh' a moment/movie as it turned out to be in the end, that summer really was a special time for the then 21-year-old me, never to be repeated, at least not to the same extent. Thanks to none's excellent assistance, I'm finally able to share it with people that care about such things rather than keeping the tape in an old drawer, unwatched and getting moldy, probably. I was just going to do a straight transfer, but he offered to gussy it up for me. :)
Enjoy!
Ripplin