Wow, just saw this thread for the first time. It all seems so familiar somehow... LOL, reminds me a lot of the Starkiller Ranch... and various other prequel edit idea threads that have dropped off page one and disappeared over the years.
One thing I have mentioned before is my personal edit of TPM, one time I went in and just hacked everything out of the film I didn't like. It is much shorter, the changes are drastic, but the story is the same and I think it worked quite well.
First, I kept the opening sequence in the eyes of Qui-gon and Obi-Wan only, no switching back and forth from heroes to the villians. I think it ultimately speeds up the pace of the opening, and makes the villians more villianous. They are waiting to meet with some one, their ride explodes, poisionous gas, robots, try to cut through the door, bigger robots, excape into the vents, stall away and meet up on the planet.
They run into Jar Jar, but they don't ask him for help, I cut the conversation a little, they take off running and Jar Jar says, "More did you say?" and runs after them. Next shot of them they are on the steps of Theed, Jar Jar followed them. No Gungan city, no submarine. Kind of weird Jar Jar just follows them and they don't bother to ask why, but I think it works well enough.
The other drastic thing I did was the podrace, I don't remember how long it was, or how short I managed to make mine, but I really cut the sucker down and sped up the pace. The end result was what felt like a much higher speed race, more like a drag race than stock car racing. I shortened it to one lap, so now it is just zipping through canyons and people blowing up left and right. I used the Beggar's Canyon track from the Shadows of the Empire soundtrack, as has become the standard fanedit scoring for that race, and my whole race runs no longer than the duration of that track.
I am by no means an audio guy, I just don't have an ear for music. I actually really like the stripped down edit of TPM I made for myself, it is my ideal version of the film, but the audio is very rough. If somebody every did an edit with drastic cuts like this with rescoring to cover the cuts, I think it would be a really good edit of the movie. Ultimately you can edit Jar Jar down to a minimum, and he is not too annoying at all, to me this is much more effective than redubbing him (I am a very big opponent of redubbing, I have just never seen a fan edit in which it really worked that well).
Just thought I'd mention these, as I have never seen a current edit go this far before.
