The Star Wars Prequel trilogy flat- out sucks: I t’s the one thing that’s holding most fans back from super high expectations for the next Star Wars trilogy. That said, there are ways to redeem them, and one editor has made some edits that make them watchable.

Intrepid YouT uber Scruffy- Scoundrel has gone through and re-edited the entire prequel trilogy, taking out all the dumb bits: scrambling up crappy dialogue from the Neimoidians and Jar Jar Binks, and so forth. The result is a movie that’s actually watchable.


Here’s some of what he removed from The Phantom Menace:

- Nemoidian and Gungan voices are re-vocalized with alien dialect and subtitled. - Journey to Gungan underwater city removed - Jar Jar is now a useful character instead of an annoying tag-along - Nemoidians are much more devious and less cowardly - Childish Battle Droid dialog removed - Queen Amidala’s voice is pitch-shifted back to her normal pitch. (Still could not remove her horrible British accent) - Naboo pilot Ric Olié’s endless plot exposition removed when appropriate - Midichlorian references removed - Anakin immaculate conception removed - All fart and poop jokes removed - Anakin is edited to be a more deliberate hero instead of an accidental one. - Removed as many “Yippe!” and “Whoa!” and “Whee!” exclamations as possible. - Removed the two headed pod race announcer - Shortened the podrace intro scene and tightened the whole race for more tension - Removed the entire sequence of trying to capture the Viceroy at the end.

Attack of the Clones:

Following in my tradition of editing the Prequels, I give you the Anti-Cheese version of Attack of the Clones. This film had some cool stuff in it, but was horribly mangled by the awful dialog and acting, especially between Padme and Anakin. There was also a lot of extra cheese in this one as well that needed to go. So, Anakin and Padme’s scenes were drastically edited to make Anakin way less whiny and petulant, and most of the cringe-worthy dialog was removed. Jar-Jar’s voice as well as the voice of the Neimodians were either removed or replaced. Several scenes were removed entirely, most notably Anakin’s breakdown in the shop at the Lars homestead after killing the sandpeople, and R2 and C3PO are removed entirely from the ending battle in the droid factory and the arena. Those scenes were just too much cheese for my liking. There’s about 100 other little edits that tighten things up and helped this fatty lose about 20 minutes of run-time- and frankly I think it’s for the better. Again, your mileage may vary.

Revenge of the Sith:

As the final chapter in my Prequel Anti-Cheese anthology, I present to you my edit of Revenge of the Sith. Before you ask, yes- I took out Vader screaming “NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” at the end. Honestly, I thought that was about all I needed to do, because Jar Jar only said 2 words in this film so I thought it would be an easy edit. Turns out that I needed to cut about 15 minutes of cheese in order to get this baby down to about 2 hours and 5 minutes.

This sort of reinforces my theory that the prequels aren’t necessarily irredeemable: there’s good material in there for what they are, and most of the excess was just indulgent crap that George Lucas thought was funny (s ort of like the Ewoks). While they still don’t hold a candle to the Original trilogy, they can be tightened up and improved. Maybe Disney will do their own “ Special Editions” at some point.


[Polygon]