OutboundFlight said:
I would suggest for the prequels cut all of Ep 1 (except as a prologue of you are making those), one mid movie time jump is enough for an episodic movie and it adds nothing to the story.

Tempting, but I think the end-product would be somewhat dysfunctional. I just ran it through my head and it doesn’t seem to go well, at least as a mental experiment. The first idea that occurred to me was to have the Ep1 segment end with Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan having picked Anakin up from Tatooine. But of course then I immediately realized the rest of the movie would leave the gaping question of whatever happened to both Qui-Gon and Darth Maul.

So, I could jump immediately to the Maul-vs-Jedi confrontation on Naboo, but my first impression is that that would feel like something’s missing; like there’s really not much significance to this kid they’ve picked up.

I dunno, I’ll hafta play around with it. Thanks for the feedback, though!

Hmm, this just occurred to me as well. If I negated TPM altogether - where would Obi and Ani ever be introduced by their names??? The name Skywalker is first heard 2/3 of the way into Clones, though Kenobi is heard very early on. However, I’m going to be doing a lot of cutting of scenes and dialogue in which their names are heard, so it’d be better to have them already established using TPM material. And in TPM when Qui-Gon breaks off the fight with Maul and leaps aboard Amidala’s ship, he immediately introduces Anakin and Obi-Wan to each other; says their full names, so that’s a perfect intro.

On the other hand, do you think it would work to simply put their names in the opening crawl…?