here’s a rough cutlist for TPM:
- Replaced 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm logos with the old 70’s versions (I do this on all my Star Wars edits)
- Removed Nute’s "As you know, our blockade is perfectly legal)
- Removed Nut’s first “WHAT?!” before “what did you say?!” to the protocol droid.
- Removed some of Qui-Gon being brough tea for pacing.
- Cut straight from Palpatine’s “Kill them immediately.” to the ship being attacked.
- Removed some battle droid dialogue.
- Removed some of Nute’s dialogue before the destroyer droids show up.
- Removed some stilted dialogue from the Amidala video chat.
- Cut straight to the army arriving after “a communications disruption can mean only one thing: Invasion”
- Trimmed Jar-Jar’s introduction to make Qui-Gon purposefully tackle and knock Jar-Jar to the ground instead of Jar-Jar jumping on him and being ridiculous.
- Removed “exsqueeeeze me”
- Removed some of the business of getting to Gunga city.
- Tidied up dialogue throughout Gunga City. No Boss Nass ticks save one irritated jowl shake, and no mention of the planet core.
- Removed planet core sequence.
- Move Jar-Jar’s explanation of being banished because of his clumsiness to just before they arrive at the city.
- Generally removed all of the “now there are two of them!” “we shouldn’t have made this deal!” “A Sith, here?!” nonsense at the end of the Trade Federation scenes.
- Removed Jar-Jar stepping in poop-eh and his ruckus in Watto’s shop.
- Removed Anakin’s “all my life” response to being a pilot. Just always sounded silly to me. He’s 9.
- All of the Anakin’s yippees, whoooahs, and oopses have been removed.
- 3PO has been completely removed from this film, as with AOTC.
- Toned down Jar-Jar’s reaction to Qui-Gon grabbing his tongue at the dinner table.
- Removed the sequence where Anakin’s crappy friends come by to be crappy to him.
- Cut straight from Watto and Qui-Gon’s chance cube scene to the racecourse.
- Trimmed up the intros and pageantry at the podrace to get to the action faster.
- Ben Quadrineros’ pod no longer stalls out in addition to Anakin’s.
- Lots of little nips and tucks to the podrace for pacing, including adding a portion of one of the deleted scenes.
- Inserted the scene where Anakin beats up Greedo, but removed the explicit mention that he is Greedo.
- Created a new transition shot of Shmi’s door to get out of that scene.
- Inserted the deleted probe droid sequence.
- Removed "Master Qui-Gon, I’m tired.
- Lots of small cuts to the Coruscant section of the film for pacing. It’s an important section of the plot, but it grinds the movie to a halt. Need to get in and out of there as quickly as possible.
- Midichlorians are gone, obviously.
- They no longer test Anakin by asking him what’s on their etch-a-sketch, which to me is a supremely stupid way to determine if someone should be a jedi.
- Maul is not shown again until Duel of the Fates, so the audience can forget about him for a little while till that reveal.
- Made everything Anakin and Jar Jar do a bit more deliberate throughout the ending so they’re not “accidentally heroes”
- Used Hal’s structure of moving the Queen capturing the Viceroy to after the control ship is destroyed.
This is a high level list, there are small trims, lines removed, shots rearranged, etc. through every scene. Again, I’m not doing anything revolutionary with this one, as to me this is still the best and most functional of the prequels. Just trying to smooth it over and remove some annoyances. It’s about 90% done, which means its time to start on ROTS.