How far are you willing to go with a fan edit? + Random ideas for an edit set.

Sometimes I wonder about mixing together footage from various TV shows and movies, restoring damaged deleted scenes and so on, but then I feel it’d just be a frankenstein of a story and an effort better spent on original works.

How do you approach this? Do you seek to create your ideal vision of these movies or are you leaning into accepting Star Wars for what it is?

My current ideas for personal viewing edits are a 5 movie saga. All of then would get the usual of cutting scenes, restoring others, and some special edition material added in. Besides that:

OT:
A New Hope is mostly changed to have a tighter pacing.
Empire Strike Back gets the music replaced by the soundtrack versions as often as possible.
Return of the Jedi gets less childish humor and possibly the sister twist removed (alongside mentions and hints in the other films)

A Clone Wars 2003 film edit: Only shorts about Anakin, Obi-Wan, the villains and the Battle of Coruscant are kept. The soundtrack would be replaced by film tracks, and some new elements like a title crawl.
Unlike all the others, the cuts are less over quality and more about making it feel like one of the main movies.

Revenge of the Sith: Changes to make Anakin more compelling and closer to his 03 version, and to undo some continuity mistakes.

I wonder about editing the other prequels and Rogue One, but nothing I could do would make the origin story satisfying to me, even if I do like several parts of those movies, and Rogue One isn’t particularly relevant to the main story. I do also like the others cartoons and some of the live action shows, but those are way too long and the continuity too messy.

Really good question MORC and one I’ve also been wondering how editors approach this.

I’ve got more into editing recently and for me personally I’ve realised it’s been so long since I watched any official release that after having to revisit them for my own personal edits it almost feels like watching a new edit lol.

For PT it’s a mix of removing some awkward, stupid or unnecessary scenes and adding scenes back in that help the film flow better, I try to keep each edit at roughly 2hrs to keep in line with the OT.

For OT it’s mainly removing some of the special edition scenes that just ruin the films.

And for ST well I cross that bridge when or if I get to it lol.

The one thing I’m struggling with is going back revisiting and starting over and once I feel I’m happy I now end up just revising it again😬, feel like I’m sort of stuck in a loop at the minute🤦.