Hey Peter, I think we had a convo about this. Why not establish that the Clone army has been openly under construction for sometime, the dart leads them to Kamino, but what Kamino is isn’t a mystery. So Kenobi goes and acts like he is just coming for a review of the clones, and learns about the Jango, who matches the description of the bounty hunter he’s after.
You can add “I will create a Grand Army of the Republic…” line somewhere in TPM, maybe an edited version of that scene where we don’t have a close-up of Palpatine saying it (because of his appearance difference between Ep 1 and 2).
Maybe the opening crawl from Ep 2 could say that this thing Padmé is voting on is to approve for more clone units to be made, or possibly to give Palpatine emergency powers to counter the Separatist threat. Or maybe the vote is to approve for the clones to actually be deployed across the galaxy to defend the Republic. They’ve been building the army, but they haven’t left Kamino yet.
This way you won’t have to cut so much out of the movie.
Well I would not just cut Kamino, but change and reorder most of the first half of the movie.
Also I won’t cut all the scenes of Kamino, but try to reuse some of them.
The Scene of Obi-Wan telling Mace and Yoda will be reused. In my version a random, cloaked Jedi will tell them about his investigations on the traces leading to spice-miners on the moons of Naboo , that Mace mentioned in the first scene in Palpatines office.
And I will keep the space-battle over Geonosis. Obi-Wan will be ambushed by Jango, when he approaches Geonosis.
Palpatine/Darth Sidious will inform Jango about the investigations and command him to kill the Jedi.