hitfan

I’m a very casual lurker on this forum and I had posted a while back that I had never seen the show and that I’d love to see a “movie edit” version of Season 1 of the Mandalorian.

And now to my surprise, I see that it is out. I’ve located a torrent download, and once I have watched it, I will let you know what I think.

Thank you for this.

Hello Hal9000,

I would be very honoroed if you could provide a link to download your edits for Cloak Of Deception and The Approaching Storm.

Thank you

smudger9 said:

hitfan said:

This sounds like a great idea. I haven’t watched the show, so if I watch this edit, I can let you know what I think.

Wow. It would be great to get the perspective of someone who hasn’t seen the show. I would still recommend watching the show because there is a lot of cool stuff that I haven’t been able to include.

I’ll make sure to come back here periodically to find out when this edit comes out. I think this is a great thing being done here – a Reader’s Digest version of a much talked-about television series that is edited and structured into a single theatrical film experience. And yea, I understand that a lot of things will have to be cut.

As for myself not having watched the show, there are a couple of factors:

1. I don’t have Disney+ 😃 (yes, I know there are ways around this)
2. Lack of free time to commit myself to episodic series. I much prefer to devote my free time to watching movies–you can watch a movie once and you are done with it. And I still have an entire backlog of half-watched TV shows that I need to catch up with.

This sounds like a great idea. I haven’t watched the show, so if I watch this edit, I can let you know what I think.

EPISODE IX
THE RISE OF SKYWALKER
After Jedi Master Luke Skywalker’s valiant last stand at the BATTLE OF CRAIT, the spark of hope lives on. To suppress the growing uprising, the diabolical FIRST ORDER silences all communication between neighboring systems.

To unite the desperate worlds, the RESISTANCE dispatches agents across the galaxy while Rey, the last of the Jedi, continues her training under General Leia Organa.

Meanwhile, a disturbance in the FORCE has led Supreme Leader Kylo Ren to MUSTAFAR in search of a Sith artifact…

I like this. It has power and impact, and is concise and to the point. How about some minor changes:

“After Jedi Master Luke Skywalker’s heroic last stand”

“To unite the disparate worlds,”

Jamesleaf said:

Okay, I have searched and searched for this, but am unable to locate it. Any chance anyone could help me out?
Big fan of these. My favourite edits have to be despecialized or Hal9000’s custom SE (can’t wait for ROTJ), but my nostalgia brain is desperate for a link to this.
Thanks

I found it through a torrent just a few days ago myself. It take take a bit of time to download it completely (as the one who was seeding it wasn’t always online) but I eventually got it.

I’m a big fan of Harmy’s restoration of the original Star Wars. But having the 1997 version of the movie is a real treat, especially considering that when they were released theatrically, it was a chance to watch the OT on the big screen for those who missed it the first time around, albeit in altered form. I myself saw ESB and ROTJ in the theater when I was a kid, but never Ep. 4. When the Special Edition came out, I remember watching it at midnight on opening night and the movie theater was packed. And being able to see Jabba in his pre-Phantom Menace CGI form makes for an interesting curiosity.

I instantly became a purist when I saw Ep 4 Special Edition in the movie theater in 1997.

pi hated the CGI robots tacked on that looked way out of place on Tattooine.  Greedo shooting first made me roll my eyes.  While I thought the Jabba scene was interesting, I thought it took away from the anticipation of his big reveal in ROTJ.

i had no interest in seeing the other two SEs, and promptly bought the 1995 VHS copies as I knew then that they would never become available again.

And when I saw TPM in 99, I saw that Lucas had lost it.  AOTC was even worse.  As a consolation, I really did like ROTS, but the bad in the prequels clearly outnumbers the good.

georgec said:

I will say the battle droids looked incredibly stupid, like they had the head and snout of an Afghan Hound.

 

The battle droids looked like vacuum cleaners!

TV's Frink said:

I can't think of a single reason to read that article.

Read it for the comedy!

The political subtext was semi-interesting as a concept, but it was badly executed.

As for theforce.net, do they ban prequel bashers on sight?  What's their motive for gushing over the prequels and the special editions?

I first saw the Holiday Special in 1998--somebody had posted the entire movie in RealPlayer format on a website.

I liked it for what it was--it was pretty cool to see another Star Wars movie with the original cast, however flawed it was.

Jaskoen said:

hitfan, if there was a channel that only ever showed the movies you list in your post, I would subscribe to it.

 

Well, thank you!  Thing is, I probably forgot to put a bunch of other movies in my 'honorable mentions' list.  I just remembered buying Scarface (1983) on DVD, so I'll have to update it again.  And I actually like Russ Meyer's movies as well, most notably "Common Law Cabin" (1967).

I need to update it again.

I've never really put down my favorite films of all time.  But I'll try...

1) Nightmare Castle (1965) starring Barbara Steele.  Gothic horror cinema at it's finest.  I only discovered this movie a few years ago on a public domain DVD collection and was drawn into a world of haunted castles, paintings of dead beautiful women and the true golden age of horror film.

2) Tales of Terror (1962) starring Vincent Price.  The Roger Corman-Edgar Allan Poe cycle was the American answer to the British horror cycle.  Vincent Price is so good that he can read a McDonald's menu and make it sound like Shakespeare.

3) Curse of Frankenstein (1957) starring Peter Cushing.  The film that started the British horror cycle (1957-1974) and it's the best one.  Doctor Frankenstein is not a sympathetic figure as portrayed in Mary Shelley's novel, he is a pure sociopath who has no qualms about robbing corpses and even murder.  You can't help but cheer for Peter Cushing here.

4) Mulholland Drive (2001) directed by David Lynch.  Every time I watch this movie, I notice something new with it.  The best "dream within a dream" film ever made.

5) The Empire Strikes Back (1980).  I know it's cliche to say that ESB is the best Star Wars movie, but it is.  This represents the best of the saga when it was at it's peak.

I have so many other "favorite" movies that I can only list the rest as honorable mentions:

Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Wicker Man (1973) starring Christopher Lee, Nosferatu (1922), Fright Night (1985), Pulp Fiction (1994), Grindhouse (2007), The Last Man on Earth (1964) starring Vincent Price, Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), 2001 (1968), Full Metal Jacket (1987), The Watchmen (2009), Star Wars (1977), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), Soylent Green (1973), Zardoz (1974), The Omega Man (1971), Planet of the Apes (1968), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Metropolis (1927) directed by Fritz Lang, Black Sabbath (1963), A Fish Called Wanda (1988) starring Kevin Kline, Raging Bull (1980), Evil Dead II (1987), The Two Towers (2002), Fellowship of the Ring (2001), Excalibur (1982), Escape From New York (1982), The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962), The Terror (1963), 1984 (1984), Star Trek I (1979), Carnival of Souls (1962), Citizen Kane (1941), Birth of a Nation (1915), The Searchers (1956), Lost Highway (1997), Reservoir Dogs (1991), Horror of Dracula (1958), The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1972), Brazil (1986), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), The Body Snatcher (1945), Son of Frankenstein (1939), The Mummy (1932), Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Vampyr (1932), Count Yorga (1970), Dracula (1979) starring Frank Langella, Scarface (1983), Common Law Cabin (1967), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Rocky (1976), Rocky III (1982), First Blood (1982), True Lies (1994), Psycho (1960), Clerks (1994), Rasputin the Mad Monk (1966), The Innocents (1961), Goldfinger (1964), Demons of the Mind (1972), Targets (1968), The Shootist (1976), Twins of Evil (1971), Phantasm (1979), Alien (1979), Last House on the Left (1972), Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay (1971), Freaks (1932), The Sadist (1963), City of the Dead (1960), Blood From the Mummy's Tomb (1971), House on Haunted Hill (1959), Comedy of Terrors (1963), Asylum (1972), The Blair Witch Project (1999), Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), Tower of London (1962), The Fly (1986), The Wrestler (2008), An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe (1970), Masque of the Red Death (1964), Zombie 2 (1979), Saw (2004), Scars of Dracula (1970), Madhouse (1974), Vanishing Point (1971), Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972), Creepshow (1982), The Oblong Box (1969)

I have a hard time judging my favorite films against each other.  If I really like a movie, I buy it.  But B-Horror movies are definitely my favorite genre, so the top 3 above is pretty solid for me.

walking_carpet said:

+1

finding the worse scene in TPM is like debating the worse player on the Bears offensive line.  But this is a microcosm.

+10

There was a lot of suckage in TPM: Anakin is a cutesy 10 year old.  Slavery is bad.  Yippee!  That's gotta hurt no matter what planet you come from.  Boss Nass.  Anakin destroys the command center by accident.

It's really hard for me to pinpoint the one singular moment of the movie that is the worst.  What sticks out the worst in my mind is the two headed announcer during the pod race.  The need to inject really bad comic relief moments every few minutes just wears you down after a while.

I ignore the prequels, more or less.  I much prefer the version of the prequels that was built up in my mind when Obi Wan speaks of the Old Republic, the Jedi and how Anakin was a great friend and great pilot.

I've seen the fan edits of TPM and AOTC, and while they greatly improve the pacing and the dramatic tension, they are still not nearly as good as the original trilogy.

Perhaps those web articles were right: it was George's ex-wife who edited the original Star Wars into the space opera grand masterpiece that it was.  Empire Strikes Back is superior in many ways to it's predecessor, and George Lucas delegated the script and the direction to other talented individuals.  While ROTJ was still a very good film, one can recognize many of the bad elements of the prequels starting to creep in here.  A foreboding of things to come.

Those were interesting articles.

You'd think that Lucas would have tried to emulate the talented people he surrounded himself with in the early days of Star Wars.  Can't he see why Han shooting first is just better?

After watching the turd sandwich that was TPM in 1999, I started to buy Marvel back issues of the Star Wars comics of the 1970s and 1980s in order to remind me how cool Star Wars used to be when it was at it's peak.

The Holiday Special is also EU, and I'll watch that occasionally for a bit of fun.

theprequelsrule said:

I always pictured the fall of Anakin to be something very basic; power corrupts and abolsute unlimited power corrupts abolsutely unlimitedly (is that a word?). So Anakin was a great Jedi who fell in love with himself, his prestige etc., and caused him to commit more and more heinous acts to preserve these things.

Are you a sincere 'prequels lover' ? ;)  It's OK if you are.  I hate Eps. 1 and 2, but I like Episode 3--though I still have problems with how Anakin turned to the dark side.

Whether it's Anakin being given a terrible choice, or whether power corrupts him, there needed to be something very dramatic.

All I know is that I consider the prequels to be apocryphal and non-existent and I never watch them anymore.  The back story that was built up by Alec Guinness playing Obi Wan Kenobi and telling Luke how the Republic lasted for a thousand generations (years?) and how his pupil Darth Vader betrayed and murdered his father is far more poignant in my mind.

Bingowings said:

I still maintain that it was a mistake to focus too much on Anakin/Obi-Wan etc

We get to learn almost everything we need to know about them in the OT.

The PT would work better as drama if those characters were relatively minor characters and the characters we care about in the first three episodes don't have a zone of certainty around them.

That way people watching them after the OT will not know they are safe or doomed and people watching from the PT through to the OT will not have the plot spoiled from the later episodes.

They need to be in there somewhere but we don't need them to be the main characters any more than we need Mon Mothma and Motti to be the main characters of the OT.

We didn't need to see Yoda at all.

I anticipated a new Star Wars movie during the lean years (1984-1998).  There was a lot of feverish anticipation leading up to TPM, and whatever it's flaws, the trailer for it was absolutely awesome.

A prequel trilogy without Yoda would certainly preserve the surprise in ESB when it's revealed that the annoying green muppet is actually him.

I also wonder how the prequels would have been like if the name Darth Vader and the mask never appeared in Episode III.  Just have Obi Wan seemingly kill Anakin after he turned to the dark side.  When people see Episode IV, audiences will wonder who Darth Vader is.  And they'll wonder why Obi Wan told Luke that Vader killed Anakin.

Filthy Pierre said:

The greatest flaw was starting at the wrong point in the story.

Should of started with Anakin as a Jedi already already trained by Obi and Yoda.

As said in one of the posts it should of started with Episode 3 and have that as Episode 1.

The Star Wars audience could never, ever identify with a 10 year old Anakin Skywalker.  Small kids?  Probably.  But if I was a little kid watching TPM for the first time, I wouldn't have liked Anakin all that much either.

Your proposal for a different starting point is an interesting one.  I probably wouldn't have introduced Anakin Skywalker till Episode 2 when he was in his late teens, early 20s.  Obviously, he needs a love interest of sorts to be the mother of Luke and Leia.

But there definitely needs to be stronger motivation for Anakin to turn to the dark side.  Perhaps he turns because he is given such a terrible choice where the alternative (the right thing to do) might even have other negative consequences--and not just a possibility that "Padme might die" because of some vague nightmare.  Perhaps Anakin has to use the dark side to overcome such a powerful and overwhelming enemy that we can somewhat understand where he is coming from.

I'm no writer or anything like that, but a competent screenwriter could flesh out something that would be extremely tragic.

I re-registered to the forum here.  I remember coming here years ago to vent a bit about the 2004 DVDs.  I forget what username I used back then, so I created a brand new one.

I don't think I will buy Star Wars on Blu-Ray -- it's not a boycott, just that I've shelled so much money buying the 2004 DVDs and only to rebuy the 2006 DVDs with the letterbox original theatrical releases that I don't want to shell out more money all over again.

My hope is that fan backlash will be so great with the current bluray release, that Lucas will finally cave in and release the theatrical editions of the OOT on Blu-Ray.  At that point I _might_ buy them, but I'll probably decide against it.  But I still hope that they do get released so that true Star Wars fans get their well-justified wish.

Lucas should really stop revisiting his previous work.  Some "Director's Cut" or "Special Edition" releases of old movies are justified.  Case in point, the Donner Cut of Superman II.  But the changes being constantly made by LFL are major creative ones.  Like Hayden Christensen in Jedi, Greedo shooting first, Ian McDiarmid replacing Clive Revill in ESB, etc.

I can understand if a director or artist wants to revise or improve a previous work.  But Lucas' changes, to put it succinctly, just plain suck.  The only change to Star Wars I can conceive that actually improved it was putting in Jabba in Episode IV.  "Jedi Rocks" with it's myriad of Monsters Inc-like puppets crooning to the camera that replaced the awesome "Lapti Nek" is so cringe-inducing that I wanted to toss the DVD and smash it into a thousand pieces.

Well, I'm sure what I just wrote has been discussed many times here.  I think that Star Wars' creator has caused me to hate Star Wars.