I see these particular edits have recently gotten a little love over on io9 (dot) com too, and I always find it interesting to read the various comments at the bottom of articles like these - (note - this article includes a newer link to JeremyMWest-Esquire’s ‘The Phantom Menace Anti-Cheese Edit’, which shows it in full HD now) - io9.com/include-these-anti-cheese-star-wars-prequels-while-you-1747781701
I actually downloaded a heap of prequel edits from Youtube over the last couple of weeks - approx. 15 or 16 of them in total (!), both individual and 3-in-one style versions. This was because I don’t think any of them are listed over at Fanedit (dot) org…and I was curious to see what these guys had done with certain scenes compared to my own intended ‘cut-lists’. And also because I wasn’t sure how long they would be available to view there!
I haven’t had the time to check out any of them properly yet, but I skimmed a couple of the scenes in JeremyMWest-Esquire’s ‘The Phantom Menace Anti-Cheese Edit’…and his re-subtitled Watto dialogue about ‘detonating’ young Anakin when he first appears gave me a chuckle - this new dialogue should be in every edit that features this scene now, as far as I’m concerned…and Watto delivers the line with aplomb. 😃
On the strength of that alone, I’m going to check out all of these ‘anti-cheese’ edits throughout, to see what else he came up with - I know he’s scrapped Shmi’s ‘immaculate conception’ assertion to Qui-Gon, which is a bit of dialogue I’m definately removing too…as I’m very content to leave whatever happened to Anakin’s ‘father’ as an open-ended question - I just imagine he probably died or got killed when Anakin was even younger…or maybe he was just ‘passing through’ that part of Tattooine at the time, and only had a brief fling with Shmi before moving on to somewhere uknown to her - who knows? 😉
Personally, I’m not keen on the whole ‘chosen one’ aspect of the Jedi that George settled on…but can accept that storyline better so long as there’s no ‘unexplained birth/midiclorians’ involved whatsoever.
And the next prequel edit I hope to watch all the way through after those, will be one called ‘Star Wars: The Blackened Mantle (The Prequels Rewritten/Recut)’ by Darth Lunar - this looks to be a really interesting 3-in-one style edit, due to the fact it uses the Japananese language soundtracks, and has been completely re-subtitled throughout! So as I don’t understand Japanese, I can watch (and listen) to this quite happily, and imagine it to be a ‘foreign film’ version of the movies. Again, I’ll be interested to see what Darth Lunar came up with, and I reckon it could transform the tone of these movies with an almost ‘samurai’-type of gravitas for certain characters now.
For the record, my own ideal versions won’t have any re-subtitling over and above the brief subtitles that already exist in the prequels, as I want my younger family members to be able to easily follow what’s being said by the characters…without asking me what they are saying throughout! 😉
However, Darth Lunar’s edit looks to be a very different take on the source material, and I don’t mind reading fully-subtitled movies, personally. There’s a link to it in the first post of this recent thread about it, if anyone else is interested - originaltrilogy.com/topic/Has-anyone-watched-The-Blackened-Mantle/id/46103
(By the way, can anyone tell me how on earth some of these full-length edits have remained up on Youtube for so long, while other snippets and clips get removed almost instantly? I’m curious to know)