Thanks so much for the kind words you two! And yeah, when Tartakovsky & Co. go hard, they go hard. Primal is probably some of the most intense stuff I’ve seen in a looooong time.
Well, it appears the link is already getting The Dread Quota Cooldown applied to it, BUT: I do believe the tried ‘n’ true method of bypassing said cooldown still applies! You create a shortcut of the file, you create a folder on your own google drive, you put the shortcut in the new folder, and you just download that folder. I’ll link the reddit post that provides the clearest instructions on how to do it (the comments are your typical smattering of “IT DOESN’T WORK… oh wait, nevermind I just did it wrongs” that any comments tend to be under something like this)
…but worse come to worse you might just have to wait a few hours and try again.
NICE! Thank you 😃
Okay, the cut is now live!
CHANGES
I didn’t keep a complete changelist: notating the sheer amount of micro-edits being done to improve pace, cut dialog/the spaces between dialog, would be EXHAUSTING to read, but I can note some of the more impactful alterations to take the show from being 5hrs 29min down to 2hrs 14min
NO YODA. NO PLAGUEIS. Qimir does say the Jedi could call him Sith, but he never does quite say he is one, so considering that Kylo theme keeps getting quoted in the score, it can still be freely headcanon’d that these two somehow start the Knights of Ren, if you like that (most of the “Lore” this show had distracting it from the Kill Bill/Shaw Bros vibe is gone so it’s a lot of room to head canon whatever, really).
While Mae is reticent to participate in the Ascension as per the show (the ceremony itself has been cut down to 70 seconds total before the Jedi interrupt it) her inclination to join the Order is now implied to be an idea not-so-subtly put there BY SOL via the Force. So now when Mother Koril suggests he mindtricked her… well…
The prison ship uprising is entirely told via Sol pulling seven shots from the madman’s head while he’s in Jedi Jail.
Yord is still Yord, but shirtless Yord is, unfortunately, gone. It’s a lot of shirtless Qimir still, though (actually, almost all of that is still here!)
Qimir is not a Stranger. Mae knows who he is in this cut; their Apothecary scene on Olega has been cut so his Kramer-isms are eliminated, his music from the lagoon has been laid into the score, and his voice has been pitched back down to its normal register. His goofy high-pitched persona is only put on for the Jedi. He is not hiding his identity from Mae, and all references to her not knowing who her master is and trying to kill Jedi with no weapon (her blood type is apparently Knife-O-Positive, she just doesn’t have her own lightsaber) are omitted. Since there’s no Plagueis at all, you’re free to imagine that Mae & Qimir have been hanging out at that Dark Side Day-Spa for… awhile now. Getting FAMILIAR. Probably a little tired of each other, too.
Kelnacca’s death isn’t a race between Mae/Qimir & the Jedi anymore, it’s just a straight-up trap in this cut. Everyone knows where Mae’s going (even Ki-Adi Mundi knows it, LOL) We no longer see Mae & Qimir land on Khofar at all. The reveal of Kelnacca’s death now happens as a shaky vision Sol has after Bazil goes missing (“We need a tracker for our tracker”) that he is scared & confused by while Osha is bugging him about being allowed to confront Mae (again.) Immediately after having this vision Bazil starts howling and they take off for his house.
Bazil is mostly gone, too! He’s maybe the only thing in this show weirder and creepier than Sol, and at least you can understand Sol. I don’t know what the hell Bazil is doing, and I think the only real reason he’s on the ship is to get Pip into Mae’s hands. So yeah. The drawer-huffing rat thing is 85% gone!
The big reason Mae & Qimir fall out now is due to her getting pinched by Jecki after letting him do 90% of the dirty work, keeping him out in the open and then trying to bail (she’s clearly a little shook at finding out Osha is alive)
Vernestra is only here to reinforce that she is primarily interested in covering up whatever this is, from beginning to end, however she has to do it. She’s present at the jail when she just wants to pin it on Osha and call it a day; at the secret meeting w/ Ki-Adi (This dude SHOWS UP when Wookiees are down bad, huh!) when she wants the “investigation” out of Sol’s hands because he’s clearly going to screw it up; and when they finally go to the Brendok aftermath. Sorry, no lightwhip sequence while looking at the Khofar aftermath.
Unfortunately, keeping Vernestra Coruscant-bound and only present when needed on cover-up duty means the great David Harewood (the Martian Manhunter himself!) is only in one shot of this cut, at the very end, with no lines, when she is chucking Sol’s dead body under all four tires of the bus and telling the bus to back up.
Mae no longer suggests Osha can and will come find her at the end, and Qimir no longer says he will “attempt” to wipe her memory. He says definitively that he can, and he does - she doesn’t stumble or try to recite another syllable of their poem once he performs the mindwipe.
Other than that, it’s just a lot of shoe-leather getting removed, mostly: wipes to and from locations (this show had a LOT of wipes!) where people basically just have variations on the same conversations (“Why won’t you let me have revenge?” “Why do you keep telling me this very obvious thing I refuse to believe for no reason?” “Why are you pretending not to know the thing you and I were both there for?”) before getting to the scene where characters and/or plot actually advance, typically through VERY COOL fight sequence, as a proper kung-fu revenge flick SHOULD resolve most emotional conflicts.
I admire how your edit aims to pay homage to the classic Shaw Brothers movies. As someone who skipped out on the show, I never would’ve thought of drawing comparisons to a defunct movie studio based in Hong Kong! 😄
I wouldn’t have thought it either! Or at least, not until I got about halfway through the season and was like “they’re really paying homage to wuxia films huh”
and then I read some interviews, and that’s where I came across the classic “Elevator pitch” quote that Headland gave re: “Kill Bill meets Frozen,” but then LATER said they were ALSO inspired by “Come Drink With Me,” considered by many to be the birth of the wuxia genre (it got nominated for Best Foreign Film in 67). Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” also got namechecked to explain why the show is jumping all over the place with the timeline and basically creating “mysteries” by only showing you half a story and then showing you the rest later like “Gotcha!”, but I clearly didn’t think that worked too well, so yeah. Outta here.
Whereas the standard “You destroyed my temple, now I vow revenge against yours! FIGHT ME!” setup/follow through of a TON of Shaw Bros kung-fu classics IS still present here. The trick is to try and stick as close to the story spine of that Shaw Bros inspiration, and its “get in a big-ass fight every 15-20min” rhythm with what’s given in the show, and how the show tried to present that as a lore-filled prequel-y Star Wars rule-bound THING.
I will say, even though this isn’t anywhere near as focused on all that mishigoss as the show proper was, I believe the way this plays, it’s a LOT easier (and a lot more easy to explain the stray Ren music motifs that appear to this end) for someone to headcanon this cut as the potential origin of the Knights of Ren. If one wanted to, I guess.
As soon as Russian Doll came out, I was like “I’m calling Lucasfilm. That’s where I want to work. That’s what I want to do.” So I pitched them. My elevator pitch was Frozen meets Kill Bill. And Kathleen bought it in the room, and said “I love it. I want to start working on it.”
Leslye Headland, Creator/Showrunner, The Acolyte.
Hello There!
I don’t often get to say I have anything in common with Kathleen Kennedy, being as she’s one of the most successful film producers in history, and I’m someone who fan-edits other people’s movies, sometimes, on the internet, for free, anonymously! But: absolutely loving that pitch? Me & Kathy are on common ground there, no doubt!
A tale of two sisters! Magical sisters! But instead of building snowmen and bursting into song and lugging Josh Gad around, these sisters are, into doing, you know, NINJA THINGS: Vengeance-fueled, stupid-sexy-shirtless STAR WARS Sith-Celebration-Come Drink With Me-Type-Stuff! Who wouldn’t love that? Well… uh… as it so happened…
This TV-to-Movie edit takes the 8-episode series, and re-shapes it into a 2hr, 14min movie, cutting away most everything not core to that solid-as-hell elevator pitch. And so:
TRAILER HERE
The Acolyte: A Star Wars Story is now a kung-fu revenge flick wherein a creepy cop, weirdly fixated on kidnapping a kid, drags his three partners into an unholy mess as he bumrushes a coven of moon witches just minding their business at the ass-end of space. This, inevitably, screws up both the kid (who he ends up discarding after a couple years) and her twin sister, who he leaves for dead after kinda/sorta/accidentally/on-purpose causing the total destruction of everything she’s ever loved and then covering that up for the next 16 years. Naturally, Sith happens.
This cut goes in straight chronological order; NO flashbacks, NO “reveals.” There is zero mystery as to what happens, and who does what and when they do it. Because this cut doesn’t do the Rashomon thing at all now, it can occupy a recognizable Shaw Bros revenge rhythm: Monks wreck temple, young student escapes, learns ancient arts, kills their way up the ladder to the real villain; who is running around like a chicken with his head cut off trying (and failing) to stop what’s coming: big-ass fight scenes every 15min or so, and then a righteous kill. But now that structure’s got lightsabers in it! A whole bunch of ‘em! And also the first real peek at what Sith training looks like, and uh… it’s hot? And therapeutic?
There’s also no forced and squishy ambiguity because of that, which I think is fine for a simple kung-fu revenge flick: Sol is clearly a sweaty (and crappy!) cover-up artist who could make this movie a 3 min Digital Short if he just admitted he sucks; but he can’t, so now everyone’s gotta die. Mae is clearly teamed up with Qimir, a simple man who enjoys philosophy, bartending, cooking and killing; he is clearly hot as hell, twice as funny, makes some great points, and most importantly: has never skipped arm day in his life. Osha is clearly even more about that life than Mae is, but is crazy-repressed because a creepy crooked space cop openly brainwashed her straight outta homeschool. Yord is Yord. Yoda and Plagueis do not exist in this Dojo. There is no main title, no opening crawl, no iris out to John Williams music. For better or worse, it’s a Star Wars Story where the “good guys” (-ish!) are witches and Sith (or proto-Knights of Ren, who knows). I don’t really have a frame of reference for how you iris out of that story into Luke Skywalker’s theme. So I didn’t!
Anyway, in keeping with the pitch that started it all, I tried applying the sort of crispy, early 2000s-era digital intermediate look the Kill Bill blu-rays had: Contrasty, sharp, a tiny-bit saturation boosted, with some Kodak 35mm film emulation laid in. It’s also got a way faster running time than the show did:
The Acolyte: A Star Wars Story
2hrs, 14min. 1080p, 2.39:1, 5.1 Dolby Digital. English Subtitles.
Chapters:
Notable changes can be found in this follow-up post here
Any questions, suggestions, let 'em fly, I’m all ears and always happy to hear what you might have to say! If this sounds at all enticing, Please don’t just ask for a link in the comments, DM me here, or send me an email directly at straightcutsnochaser at gmail.
I think this version of Rogue One is exactly what I’d want, but I think reinserting Andor’s introduction would be better at this point. I understand the idea of starting the story off through Jyn’s eyes, but Cassian’s first scenes were sorely missed.
I think this is the move, yeah. The edit as it stands is streamlined more or less as beautifully as the film can be, considering what Gilroy was working with and just the nature/focus of the narrative of the story. But Cassian’s intro to that story is a must-have now. Before that last episode aired I was still under the thinking that the whole show was essentially a series-length embellishment/replacement for that Kafrene intro, which was as nice a shorthand you could ask for the Bond-esque rogue setup (A Luthen-trained hero if there ever was one, as it turns out) in a single scene. But that last episode makes such a big deal about Tivik calling, the opposition to believing the info (even bringing back Jebel and Pamlo), and how Draven and Mon are sticking their neck out to send him out there to meet him
I do believe that scene’s gotta go back now. It’s not just his intro anymore, it’s literally validation of Luthen’s death (and his tactics, LOL. Poor Tivik). Other than that, I think this cut is structurally pretty sound.
I would also like to toss this out there as a sort of overall/philosophical idea regarding Rogue One and its relation to Andor, and specifically this edit being more focused on Jyn than it is Cassian:
The show, even though it has Cassian’s name, and uses him as a throughline, isn’t really ABOUT him all the time either. It might be a little thematically confusing trying to re-conform a cut that already trimmed down the film (which was sort of a mashup as it was by the time it made it to its finished form via Gilroy’s rewrites/reshoots) to fit a more coherent Erso-focused POV, and expand it back out and shift itself to be a coda to two seasons of television (that were written after the fact anyway, and with way more leeway and runway)
But considering how much of Andor is literally about how main characters in their own circles BECOME supporting characters in other peoples, and still do extraordinary work; and then recede (or disappear) into history’s shadows so others can become that history’s main characters… I think there’s something fitting to Rogue One (or even this edit of it) having that happen to Cassian himself. He goes through his journey throughout the show - and Rogue One is him (and K2) taking the co-pilot seat to help Jyn’s mission get completed because that’s what needs to happen for the Rebellion to succeed. That’s in Rogue One already, to some level. I think there’s a danger of short-circuiting that, instead of amplifying it, if Rogue One gets re-edited too much to be a “sequel” to Andor, to be a referendum on the guy himself instead of letting it be Jyn’s story, with Cassian as a supporting character in it.
NOT FROM A JEDI…
I do wonder if the forcefulness of Season 2 might cause folks to go back to Season 1 on rewatches and maybe revisit whether Maarva’s speech should be restored. It’s one thing hearing and seeing that scene then, but having the context of the Ghorman Massacre in full like that…
Either way, the audio is available to anyone who wants to use it in their edits going forward, just snag it off the YouTube I linked (I upped it in 5.1 so if you use the right downloaders you should be able to get it that way) or DM me if that doesn’t work, too. No permissions or credits or whatever. Grab it if you want it!
That might be the only continuity error? And even then he’s pulling jailbreaking tools out of his boot as he says it, so I’m thinking the “first” he’s referring to might be the TYPE of prison he’s in, not prison in general? Either way, the scene sort of depends on his saying something there in order to prompt Chirrut’s following line, IIRC? So even if it’s a tiny continuity error, it might need to stick for the sake of the drama/emotion in that moment.
Also, it’s been awhile, I think I shot HAL a PM a long time ago (in a forum post far far away…) but I have conformed an isolated score to this cut, and I also went ahead and took the Ryan Golden lines as linked in the YouTube video from a couple years ago, isolated out just those lines, did some processing/mixing/stretching etc, and put them into the center channel, and then put the center channel back into the mix. To my ear it works pretty well, so there’s also a 5.1 audio track that’s exactly the same as the one originally on this cut - except the scene with Krennic on Mustafar now has a Vader that sounds closer to 77/80 than 2016.
I was also thinking - Vader doesn’t necessarily have to say “prepare a boarding party” either. I know we don’t want to go so far as to repurpose “Bring my shuttle,” but basically all he has to do is ask for, or demand, a vehicle in that shot. I don’t know if there’s a line like that in Kenobi, but could be an alternate way towards getting a younger/more accurate Vader sound in that last shot.
oojason said:
I attended the world premiere of this last night on youtube - and enjoyed it (I was wondering if I’d clicked on the wrong link - or if it was going to be a joke 👍) - though thought you did a great job on it. Nicely done.
Oh yeah that’s right, you can’t just post things anymore, when you hit “post” they “WORLD PREMIERE” whatever you made live now!
Thanks everyone, for the kind words about my editing of a bad one! It dawned on me as I was typing out my post that I didn’t REALLY need to find her saying the word. I just needed a clean take of her saying half of the word. And then I realized it didn’t even need to be the full word, because she’s Irish, so any number of words will sound like it, LOL.
Me too!
But that is all Fiona Shaw! No AI. It’s part of her saying Fight from the overdub as aired, and part of her shouting “Jug!” from her early 90s reading of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, (Part 3: The Fire Sermon) - which sounds close enough in tone and timbre that when slowed down, pitched up, processed, reverbed a little; and delayed, and blended together; and then THAT is blended with the radio static and crowd noise, and then THAT is diffused and moved into the fronts and rears (and delayed a little even more) - it sounds like she’s shouting “fuck!”
Hopefully, convincingly. Maybe! In 5.1 surround! (but mostly in the center channel)
Okay, how about this
I was a little impatient with the Cassian arc at first but personally I wouldn’t cut anything. It’s such a singular work as-is. Maybe would be a cool to see an edit of each arc into a movie, with no episode title cards or credits until the end.
I agree! I feel like The Gilroys/Bissell/Willimon specifically wrote their arcs to be movies, yeah. So far this seems to me like the last arc of The Clone Wars (Victory and Death/Siege of Mandalore) which was so clearly written/directed/edited to be a single film that all you have to do is take the tops and tails off each episode and stitch em together to arrive at their intended form. You’re basically talking about fanedits where you’re making like 5 or 6 cuts total and maybe another 5 or 6 audio edits.
You could try just using Fiona Shaw’s delivery of the line where she says “F*** the Empire” in an interview with Variety. I’ve had it saved on my computer forever. Not sure if the tone of her delivery would work, but it’s worth trying since it’s an authentic delivery. Here ya go!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FDEE0U0ZL9hYIRSO032Jhdt3HGKuMmU6/view?usp=sharing
That probably won’t work because she’s very smooth/low-key about it, LOL.
There has GOT to be a line reading of her saying “fuck” somewhere in her long career where she’s basically hissing/spitting that one syllable out in a way that can be mixed/cut in seamlessly (especially with the amount of radio static and audio processing that would need to be applied) but she has acted for so long and been in so many things that I’d imagine the thing that’s prevented this from being discovered is… precisely that! She’s been such a successful actress that you’d have to comb through just a TON of work to find that one syllable.
That said, I do think it’d be a pretty satisfying hunt, because in all of season one, this is the sole fight Gilroy lost, and I would love for that bit to be restored, if only because it is more than clear he is not just building that speech to culminate in that shout, but that speech is the culmination of the whole SEASON. He is building the whole series up to Maarva shouting “Fuck the Empire” as the fuse reaching the bomb and exploding. “Fuck the Empire” is what literally sparks The Rebellion (capital T, capital R) into existence.
I see the “call to action” argument upthread and I know it’s been popularized in the meantime but that’s also kind of a misunderstanding of how “call to action” as a literary idea works, really. The whole speech is the call to action, dramatically. It’s not a description of the final line at all, it’s not describing the LITERAL sentence or line in the text that tells someone to go perform an action.
But anyway: Tony Gilroy knew what he was doing when he built the whole of the series, thematically, to arrive at that speech, and when he built that speech to culminate in that exhortation. And when Lucasfilm said “we’re censoring that” he fought it really hard (and refused to reshoot, resulting in that not-great overdub) which says that artistically - “Fuck the empire” is the better choice.
I don’t know - maybe if/when “Andor: The Complete Series” hits 4K in some special edition steelbook they’ll quietly have reverted the overdub.
Hello there!
10 years ago, EON, Sony, and MGM released Spectre, their 24th James Bond film, the 4th in their rebooted Bond Canon starring Daniel Craig, and the first they’d released after FINALLY getting legal clearance to return to the film’s titular terrorist organization, and its figurehead: Bond’s archnemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
Because it was a new canon, because it had been so long since Blofeld’s last canonical appearance, and because EON had uh… I guess forgotten the Austin Powers movies existed (?), they decided to reintroduce Blofeld as Bond’s lost (adopted) brother (!) and then retconned the plots of the three prior movies as secretly being part of Blofeld’s machinations; to (yes) take over the world, but (also) get over on his hotter, younger, cooler adopted brother.
NOW: With No Time to Die taking an even bigger swing with the Bond canon (and boldly, unapologetically standing tall on ALL the choices made in Spectre) - and considering all the hubbub around the recent transfer of creative power from EON to MGM/Amazon, it felt like a great time to take a look back, a decade later; at the big and bruised second entry from Sam Mendes, at Blofeld’s return, to see if there’s a way to take all those years, all that context, all that hindsight, and bring it to bear - almost like staring down the sights of a gunbarrel, if you will - on a new Alternate Cut of the film.
WHAT HASN’T CHANGED:
Oberhauser is still Blofeld, and Blofeld is still Bond’s (adopted!) brother. Considering No Time to Die openly acknowledges this, and considering how No Time to Die plays out, it seems like going to the trouble of cutting that relationship is like spitting into the wind - a wind blowing like 400 missiles at you or something. Especially since the transfer of power from EON to MGM is a clear demarcation point between eras now, anyway. For better or worse, that choice IS a big, defining part of EON’s stewardship: They not only decided to fully reboot Bond with Craig, they made THAT call, and then doubled down. So that call stands in this cut.
Spectre is still (sorta) funny. The blend of suavity, tension, thrills, and what can only be generously called “Dad Vibes” got revived winningly in Skyfall after Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace were straightforwardly serious as a heart attack (or a giant rope knot to the jumblies). Spectre aimed for that kind of balance too, but didn’t quite land it. It might seem easier to then trim off the comedy bits and revert back to that Quantum-styled dourness, but I think the problem isn’t the comedy itself (which mostly works in the moment), it’s the pacing of the stuff leading into and out of those bits that makes the jokes and more classic Bond-isms feel more out of place than they should be. Plus, the comedy still being present makes Waltz/Blofeld’s playing with - and purposeful souring of - that comedic tone work a little better in the context of the film.
WHAT HAS CHANGED:
Color Correction: The film is a very famous example of featuring what’s come to be known - as warmly as possible - a piss filter. Even when Bond is in mountainous, snowy climes, it appears as if everything has been doused in a fine mist of Mountain Dew. This cut has washed that sticky residue right out of the film. Well, MOST of it. The Day of the Dead is still a little sweaty, of course. As is L’American, and the arid nowhere outside of Blofeld’s lair. But if a locale is supposed to have green grass, white snow, blue sky? It’s got it now.
The pacing is quicker: Not a lot of scenes have been cut outright, but a LOT of shots, and beats within scenes and shots, have been trimmed off so Spectre isn’t spending so much time just staring at itself, which is a big part of why the film frequently feels so leaden. This ramps up the closer you get to the climax, too, so the pacing feels even more like it’s moving TOWARDS something eventful.
Bond and Swann have conversations like actual people: A huge part of the quickening of the pace involves these two speaking TO each other, not at each other, and not mooning at each other for three-counts in between line deliveries, and definitely not explicitly stating either the underlying theme of their current status as characters in the story, or foreshadowing a plot element to come. To a lesser extent (because other people did it way less) other characters cut to the chase a lot more (and sound a lot more normal because of it) too. Saves time! Sounds better!
Radiohead! One of the most famous rejected Bond themes in EON history (and you could probably put an album together of nothing BUT rejected Bond themes and it would be a platinum selling soundtrack album by itself) is Radiohead’s submitted title treatment for this film, which was turned down for being “too dour” in favor of Sam Smith’s flatline of a theme song. BUT DID YOU KNOW: the first song Radiohead submitted was its legendary B-side “Man of War (Big Boots”). Director Sam Mendes loved both submissions, but had to reject the first because it wasn’t original, and got overruled on the second by EON. Well now BOTH of them are back in the picture: “Spectre,” takes its rightful place over Daniel Kleinman’s title sequence (with help via elements from GnC Film’s famous rework from 2017), and Man of War goes in the end titles after the classic Bond Theme.
Please PM me if you’d like to check it out! As always, any suggestions, questions, critiques, comments, whatever you got, I’m all ears 😃 Thanks!
Genndy Tartakovsky’s Cartoon Network series Star Wars: Clone Wars didn’t air all that long ago, yet (it) already seem(s) to have been forgotten. This is a travesty I try to correct whenever cartoons are being discussed, and sometimes when they aren’t. It should be perched near the top of any list of the greatest animated programs ever shown on American TV. It should also land on any informed list of the greatest action filmmaking of all time, and the Russian-born Tartakovsky should claim an automatic spot on any list of the greatest action filmmakers. And although Tartakovsky is a good storyteller, in a silent-movie sort of way — expressing what’s happening moment-to-moment through picture and sound rather than in dialogue — I never watched either of these programs for their plots, and I don’t re-watch them for narrative, either. I re-watch them for the same reason that I visit art museums, attend live concerts, and pause during journeys from point A to point B in New York to watch dancers, acrobats, or street musicians: because I appreciate virtuosity for its own sake.
– Matt Zoller Seitz, award-winning writer/critic at New York Magazine, RogerEbert.com, Vulture.com.
Hello again!
There’s just something about those mostly forgotten chapters of the Star Wars saga that I got a thing for, I guess, I don’t know! After getting swept up in the pulpy whirlwind of Solo: A Star Wars Story with my Alternate Cut, I found myself chasing after an even more concentrated hit of legend with this go-round.
Genndy Tartakovsky’s 2003-2005 Micro-Series Star Wars: Clone Wars isn’t completely forgotten, of course. And edits joining its episodes together have been a mainstay of YouTube for a very, very long time. For the longest, that was the only reliable way to see the series, after the DVDs went out-of-print, Tartakovsky’s offer to run Lucasfilm Animation dissolved, and the CGI series run by Dave Filoni effectively replaced it. Of course, now the series is on Disney+, under the Vintage label, right next to the Holiday Special Boba Cartoon, and the Ewok movies (and maybe someday, the original theatrical cuts of the Original Trilogy? Ah, dare to dream, we do. But that is a good story, for another time!)
So why not just… go on YouTube and watch one of those then? Or go on Disney+ since they’re not trying to hide it anymore? What’s the deal with yet another “new” version of Clone Wars, 20 years after it ended? What’s the pitch?
The pitch is: I, like Mr. Seitz, think Genndy Tartakovsky - Samurai Jack, Primal - is one of the best action directors of the last 30 years, and this cut - cheekily named after Lucasfilm’s de-canonization branding of choice (do they even still use this label at the company anymore?) - is trying to thread the stone needle, if you will (shout out Radio Drama fans!) It isn’t trying to “update” the show via pushing it thru Topaz Video AI upscaler for that 4K 60fps interpolated HDR 5.1.4 Atmos hit. Nor is it cutting segments and scenes to force-push it into the canon; or otherwise make it make sense to any other narrative but its own. This cut just wants to present the micro-series as a film, in a way that best flows as a film, and feels like a film: A big, fat, gonzo buzzsaw of an action film that just happens to be animated, and also just happens to be a Star Wars movie, one that came out in theaters in some alternate universe 2005, just before a different Revenge of the Sith opened shortly after.
Star Wars: Clone Wars (The Legends Cut) starts with the most recent Disney+ source available, at 1080p/23.976fps, and was further cleaned via a combination of Topaz (solely for compression artifact removal) and Neat Video (for everything else) to address any noise still in the files. It was then color-corrected and filtered to more closely approximate 35mm film, including the application of real grain plates and the emulation of halation effects. The audio has been slightly sweetened and remixed in some places, but it remains Dolby Surround 2.0.
The substance of the cut itself is, like I said, not as drastic as other canon-focused cuts; but there are segments that either got in the way of flow, didn’t connect to the main “storylines” (i.e. excuses for crazy-ass setpieces), or didn’t measure up to the rule-of-cool set by the other segments. Kit Fisto’s segment on Mon Cala is out, as is the tiny interstitial with Qui-Gon and Anakin, and transitions between micro-episodes have been redone vs their initial smashing together for the DVD all those years ago - which is why everything from the meeting in Palpatine’s Office to Anakin’s goodbye to Padme in the beginning is also gone.
The opening has the correct era-specific sparkly-green Lucasfilm logo/A Long Time Ago on it, the title card has been moved to shortly after the (now-cold) Yoda open, and the ending now features not just a proper iris out, but scrolling end credits and an End Titles suite, which include excerpts from Samuel Kim’s re-orchestrated/arranged versions of the ARC Trooper and General Grievous cues from the score (which honestly sound pretty close to the original pieces as-is).
If any of that sounds like something you want to check out - “See it again, for the first time…” if you will - then by all means, please send me a PM and we’ll get that sorted out! 2hrs, 7min. Burnt-in subs for alien subtitles, English subs (srt) and chapters included. 1.78:1, 1080p, Dolby Surround 2.0.
As always, any suggestions, questions, critiques, comments, whatever you got, I’m all ears 😃 Thanks!
Hey thanks for the questions! And I definitely don’t take any offense or anything at all like that, I’m just happy folks are interested and care to toss some questions my way! Onto the bullet points:
I kept all of the Lando + L3 stuff. Not just because I don’t mind it (I thought it actually fit pretty solidly with that pulp paperback feel I was trying to preserve as much as I could) but because like 99% of Donald Glover’s best stuff in this movie is rooted there to some degree. I also feel like the Kessel Run doesn’t work as well as it can without L3 at full volume, as it were. She’s how they get out of the colony, and she’s how they complete the run, so it lessens the impact of both those things if I truncate the setup for those payoffs by muting her somewhat. The shower scene never occurred to me as a thing to cut, actually! I just thought it was one last physical comedy button on the preceding “Beast” scene where they’re both messing with each other pretty ruthlessly.
The origin of his name is completely gone along with anything that happens on Corellia.
The movie is still “Solo: A Star Wars Story” - down to the logo appearing on the screen. it doesn’t look exactly the same, nor appear in the same place though (again, no Corellia. No crawl, either)
I did address Han’s “softness” to some degree. There’s a few moments where the original version of a scene plays out in a way that makes him look like a neophyte to crime/smuggling that doesn’t track, and I’ve clipped lines/reactions so it reads less like he needs his hand held, and more like he’s just observing or waiting for an opening. There’s at least one moment that’s been edited quite a bit to make his reaction to a meaningful event less sympathetic.
Hopefully that’s not too much of a deal-killer?
Thanks for that! I did a scene-by-scene correction, but not shot-by-shot. I tried to keep it a little punchy/crunchy still, but I didn’t want to lose any details in the highlights or blow out the upper-registers if I didn’t have to - which ended up being harder than I’d anticipated. Often I’d think “well, that looks pretty solid” - and then I’d check the scopes and the shots on either side of it, and realize I’m clipping the hell out of everything past a certain point: suddenly clouds are just solid white sheets, windows are just blank white squares, etc. For a movie that is generally thought of as being flat and dim, you’d think there’d be a lot of headroom to play with, but nope!
Finding the right balance for the saturation levels was also kind of a weird tiptoe through the dials - and I probably slipped here and there, too, LOL. I’m no Dre, after all. But all in all I think I landed in a place where it looks right for the paperback vibe - not oversaturated, not blown out - but not low-contrast or faded, either. Just the right amount of pulpy & vivid, if maybe a teeeeensy bit inaccurate (or color-cast in a slightly too-strong direction) for a scene or two.
Hello again!
I wasn’t really expecting to do another edit so soon after the Alien: Romulus one, and I didn’t really think I was actually doing one until I realized I’d spent couple 2-3am nights in a row poking at what I thought was just an idea or two I had. I guess it was inevitable. You hang around OriginalTrilogy, you’re gonna give a Star Wars edit a go (ya lumpy brute!)
Anyway: Solo! Why that one? Well, I think the last 7 years have been okay to it, really! There’s always been sort of rueful charm there, a ramshackle vibe that feels like a dog-eared Del Rey paperback come to life, and almost 10 years later, I feel like it’s actually grown into that more. I liked that it didn’t really take itself or “Star Wars” that seriously! I didn’t mind its tone, or the irreverence with which it treated its “legends,” none of that!
What I minded was what everyone else seemed to mind: The look is a complete mismatch with that tone (all respect to Bradford Young), it took way too long, and it took way too much pleasure in stopping to pull up Wookieepedia pages and explain them way too loudly. Now, this edit doesn’t get rid of all the “And here’s how Han did X!” stuff, because then there’d be no movie; that’s just the cost of admission here, unfortunately. But there can be some balance between letting backstory just be backstory, in the back somewhere - and letting things also be foreshadowing without signaling that through on-the-nose yapping about it as it’s happening!
So that’s the goal of this Alternate Cut - to keep that paperback vibe alive, while minimizing the “lore”-fest it gets bogged down in visually and metaphorically. I’ve tried to do that via some scene and dialog deletions - primarily conversation trims (a few throughout), especially with Han’s would-be “mentor”/enemy Tobias Beckett, and through the excision of Corellia entirely (that’s the big one). There’s also the removal of that one special guest star since it was always kind of a goofy Marvel-esque inclusion that never went anywhere in the first place; and your by-now-standard color-correction. It’s no “The Bold One” or anything, but hopefully it’s providing the show a little more punch. (examples below).
Please PM me if you’d like to check it out! As always, any suggestions, questions, critiques, comments, whatever you got, I’m all ears 😃 Thanks!
DAMN! Thanks so much for saying that, and for taking time out of your holidays to check this edit out, too! Very, very much appreciated 😃 - I did in fact remove the Reebok closeup, as part of getting rid of Kay’s self-injection scene/ending giveaway.
That one cut is… yeah, you nailed it - it’s the best option of getting out of that room without Rook in it. I kinda worked backwards from the progression of the “One Directive” shifting over the course of the movie already, and figured that without Andy stopping to talk to Rook after the Corbelan crash (where the “one directive” first starts breaking down actually), I’d need to imply/allude to the module rewriting him pretty rapidly before that. I cut some lines in the previous scene (i.e. “for what purpose I do not know”) and added music to his preventing Rain from trying to pop his module out to hint at this even more strongly than the theatrical already does.
BUT: the real reason I’ve got him up at the front of the room obliquely being confusing/ominous about his One Directive isn’t story-based, I gotta admit. It’s geographical. It’s because without Rook, I need to have a reason to have him separated from the group (the original version of the scene has him huddled down there with them when Navarro comes to), and saying SOMETHING that will cause the whole group to look at him, and specifically Rain to look really shook and Navarro to go “what is he talking about” - and puts him in the position, geographically, to move across the room and intercept Bjorn. And… it’s not 100%. It’s the one knot in the pine board I can’t sand out, haha. I got nothin really, when people call it out, other than “yeah - well spotted! that’s the one.”
I was hoping the deleted/alternate scenes would give me something that I could work with there, but nada. I have heard that for people who aren’t very familiar with the movie, they don’t really question that transition, it just seems like Andy doing weird shit and they roll with it - which helps a little, but considering 99% of the audience for this is probably going to be people who have seen the movie a couple times… LOL.
ANYWAY: Thank you so much for the subtitle spot, that’s been cleaned up, fixed and remuxed - if you redownload at the link you got this from, the file should be updated to the fix now. Thank you SO MUCH for that. And for this feedback. Enjoy the rest of your Christmas Day!
You weren’t wrong! Also I just… don’t think my design chops are that great. The idea’s okay but I don’t know that my execution of it is solid enough for people to be slapping up on their Plex or Jellyfin or Emby or whatever, LOL. So instead I think I’m gonna go with this and call it the final:
It’s taking the ScreenX alternate poster (The Scorched variant, not the Helmet one), reframing/recoloring slightly, and setting it inside the border of the Matt Ferguson alternate poster, also slightly recolored and altered to fit the “Alternate Cut” subtitle into the block. I think it works a little better not just as a quick visual at smaller and larger sizes on a screen, but like you said, it’s a little more representative of the cut itself. The chrysalis is the first thing you see in the movie, but that poster design is basically a callback in and of itself, and nothing much more than that, which is counter to the point of the edit. So - thank you for the critique! This is a better choice.
Okay, this is what I was kicking around for the poster idea
I appreciate the poster designs! They’re definitely the part of this I was not thinking/expecting to be fumbling with so much, LOL. I’ve got a couple ideas I’m poking at myself, I’ll post one here later tonight when I get one in shape (I think I’m close)
The red one with the dripping chin was a base I was thinking of working from, absolutely. My first thought was using the Dolby Vision poster (the facehugger crawling over Rain’s helmet) too. I might go back to it, but I figure I should at least try something