Star Wars Episode I: The Ridiculous Menace
 a TRUE FANEDIT by TV’s Frink Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi bicker like an old married couple as they try to figure out what exactly is happening to the Naboobians. Nute Gunray attempts to keep track of how many things come in twos. Ric Olie observes a great deal. And much more! |
Loading ...
TAGLINE: Every saga has a beginning. Now there are two of them.
|
INTENTION:
To make one of the most ridiculous movies ever even more ridiculous.
EDIT DETAILS:
The goal was simple – to make the most entertaining version of The Phantom Menace possible.
CUTLIST:
-New voices for C3PO and TC-14!!!
-Newly created subtitles for Jar-Jar, Boss Nass, R2D2, and more!!!
-Music by Boston, Meco, Weird Al, The Cranberries, Rebecca Black, Bad Lip Reading, The Futureheads, Katrina and the Waves, Bill Murray, The Village People, and more!!!
-Appearances by the voices of James Earl Jones, Peter Graves, General Zod, and more!!!
-Catchphrases you won’t be able to stop using, from the likes of Nute Gunray, Anakin Skywalker, RIC OLIE, and more!!!
-EVEN MORE RIC OLIE!!!
-A better use for midichlorians!!!
-A new winner in the podrace!!!
-Shocking revelations, including the new father of Anakin Skywalker!!!
-More rude and incompetent characters than you can shake a lightsaber at!!!
-Internet memes by the starcruiser-full!!!
-DID I MENTION MORE RIC OLIE?!?!?!!!!!1!111!!!
-A new crawl featuring absolutely zero exposition!!!
-The first ever use of a Garmin in a Star Wars movie!!!
-AND SO VERY, VERY MUCH MORE!!!
RELEASE INFORMATION:
Single Layer DVD
SPECIAL THANKS:
Ric Olie, for his inspirational work in The Phantom Menace.
Also, see the end credits of the movie.
TECHNICAL INFORMATION:
Edited with Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9.0
DVD created with Sony DVD Architect Studio 4.5
SPECIAL FEATURES
Deleted Scenes
Look Over There Featuring Ric Olie
You Catch On Pretty Quick Featuring Ric Olie
Semi-Entertaining Chapter Titles
Disclaimer: You must own the original movie before acquiring any FanEdited movie. We here at FanEdit.org respect the company’s copyrights, and don’t want to infringe on any company’s rights. Thank you, FE!
Maybe downloadable from Fanedit.info (enter and download at your own risk and responsibility)
| FANEDITFORUM LINK | IMAGES / COVER ART | TECH INFO | VIDEOS / TRAILER |
http://fanedit.org/feed/http://fanedit.org/comments/feed/
Absolutely spectacular!
Where to start on this, the best fan-edit ever created? I suppose I’ll start the technical side. All edits are flawless and flow like this was a cinema released film. Yes, there are audio dubs but those were intensional and add to the comedy. It plays in full widescreen and looks super sharp on my 52 inch TV. I could be really, really picky and mention the quality of the computer game graphics on the duel fight, but they suffice and really, the whole film is fantastic.
Its hard to imagine that you have made an entire movie in this parody style. It must have taken you months, if not years.
The jokes have many levels such as background music over funny dialogue. It will take several viewings to see it all and even then you will be watching it again and again. Other jokes takes a few moments for them to register, such as Obi-One talking in the third person or the ‘now there’s are two of them’ when they first happen, your left a little confused but after the running gag repeats you see the comedy take shape. This style also means that repeat viewing are a must as you will see and understand jokes the second time you didn’t understand the first time.
Plot wise, there is a major change regarding the pod race which was very, very clever. If I was to be picky, I might say there were too many subtitle jokes which forced me to read while watching which I didn’t like. I get that Jar Jar needed them, as did the droids. But the the robots, aliens and almost anything talking they gave subtitle jokes – it got a little distracting, and dare I say it… Boring. But I’m only saying this so that you keep the subtitle jokes down in the sequel and the film is absolutely amazing – I feel bad for saying anything – please forgive me, I love your work so much!!!
This is by far the best fan edit ever made and is in deserve of so many rewards it’s shocking good.
Get it now before George offers Frink a licensing deal and sticks it on the big screen!
Review by ku7uk — December 22, 2011 @ 11:57 pm
Witness the amazing TV’s Frink as he slices, dices and chops like Bart Simpson with a Ginsu knife. The Ridiculous Menace is a gleeful and manic spoof, a kind of comedic vandalism equivalent to drawing mustaches on somber portraits and throwing cream pies at stuffy politicians. The pomp and dreadful pretentiousness of the original movie is unceremoniously deflated through radical alteration of the personalities and motives of all characters, major and minor. Heroes become cads, villains become clowns, and just about everyone is reduced to a state of doddering cluenessness.
Often the humor builds in layers of ridiculousness until the humor reaches a level of surreality that would do Benny Hill or Monty Python proud. Other jokes fall flat or are obscure, but with the batting average so high and the pace of gags so fast and furious, it just doesn’t matter. This is one funny flick.
The video quality is adequate. Compression makes the focus soft on larger screens but it’s still quite watchable. A number of contributors have pitched in with special effects and those come off well, complementing the hacked and manipulated satiric tone.
The soundtrack has received a massive amount of changes, from new background music to new effects to new dialog. The end credits alone must have 30 different music clips! The detail of audio work goes down to individual inserted words, and this is the one area where technical flaws sometimes get in the way of enjoying the movie. Sometimes the words in a sentence are so mismatched it’s hard to understand what the character is saying. Additional audio processing and pitch shifting might help that out, but that would also mean many more months of work! So, as they say, deal with it.
DVD features are basic, with chapter selections and a few bonuses included to add a few gags. No off-color jokes and thankfully no potty humor, so the disk is suitable for children. Kudos to Frink and his many co-conspirators for assembling the funniest Star Wars Episode One ever. 9.5/10
Review by Brumous — December 23, 2011 @ 1:15 am
I have to say that I supremely enjoyed this edit. As with Brumous above, the number of hours spent inserting or finding individual bits of dialogue must have been exhausting, but works well throughout the entire movie.
This was a wonderful tour-de-farce that I was laughing at as soon as the movie started rolling. The most enjoyable fan edit I have seen ever.
I heartily give this movie a 10/10 and pray for sequels to this. Thanks again Frink!!!
Review by mara5150 — December 23, 2011 @ 3:40 am
On second thought, about that “no off-color jokes” … okay, there are one or two. I don’t want to steer anybody wrong. But still, pretty minimal and the fanedit probably would be rated “G”.
Review by Brumous — December 23, 2011 @ 4:06 am
The most fanedited movie of them all gets a completely new approach.
At the time of this writing, The Ridiculous Menace is the 16th fanedit of The Phantom Menace that is listed on FE. It is certainly not going to be the last either. But it is the most unique of them all. Where other edits seek to create something better than the original, something that makes it more ‘Star Wars’ in tone, feel and narrative, this edit says “Yippee!!!” and to hell with that.
This edit will not be for everyone. Audiophiles who demand clear and unambiguous sound will cringe at the sometimes choppy dialog with stray and unrelated background elements. If your brain cannot accept this audio aspect, then sadly I have to recommend skipping this. And that’s a shame because this edit stands out as one of the most unique, bold, and entertaining fanedits around. In the pantheon of spectacular Star Wars fanedits, for me this edit has its place up there with The War of the Stars, and A New Hope Revisited.
About the edit itself. What makes this edit a both a joy as well as an amazing achievement is that it is not simply a collection of cheap gags and isolated laughs, strung together against the backdrop of The Phantom Menace. While there certainly are numerous individual jokes, gags and meme-insertions, the true accomplishment of this edit is that Frink has created several new sub-plots and redefined most of the characters. Like a master comedian, Frink consistently introduces something funny, something that by itself is entertaining and funny. Then he builds on it, re-uses the core of the joke, adds to it and then punctuates it later in the edit, where the final joke is not possible or nearly as funny without the build-up beforehand.
To be fair, I do not love everything about this edit. There are some jokes which, like a Saturday Night Live sketch from the 90s, go on far too long. In particular the Pod Race and Senate sequences both come to mind. The jokes in them are good, but the pacing is long and too repetitive, causing the pacing to slow way down. However those hiccups are very few, and even with the slowed down pace, remain funny and entertaining.
As I said before, in the world of Star Wars fanedits, this has a place as one of my absolute favorites. Completely original, bold, ridiculous.
Overall, I cannot recommend this edit enough. The only thing holding it back from a perfect score are the pacing issues. This get’s a 9 out of 10 Yippees!!!!
Review by L8wrtr — December 23, 2011 @ 8:43 pm
The nature of the edit is sufficiently well established from previous reviews not to need reiterating. In essence, L8wrtr’s thoughts, both positive and negative, mirror my own, though I rather like the podrace. Video and audio quality are good, save where they are not meant to be. The presentation fits the edit well — especially the main menu — though it would be nice to see TV’s Frink have a go at his own cover art at some point.
This receives nine stars out of ten from me too. Well done, Frink!
Review by Captain Khajiit — December 24, 2011 @ 5:50 pm
First I was afraid (petrified?) to not like this edit for the same reason some people did not quite like my War of the Stars edit: jarring sound editing at parts.
Bad audio cuts, even if obviously intentionals are difficult to handle, even more than bad video cuts.
I saw various “in the making” little previews of this edit and I thought: those are funs, but could they stand the long run of a feature movie?
I’m glad to say that, to me, the answer is yes.
L8wrtr said pretty much what I think about Ridiculous Menace in his review so I won’t say much more.
There was rarely more than 2 or 3 minutes without a real good laugh,
and I have to say that english is not my first language (but if you know those movies you known already pretty much all the lines used here. They are just twisted upside down)
and I think I missed a very few amount of jokes.
Some repetitive gags are a bit too long, indeed, (senat and Obi falling from the plateforms comes to mind),
but I have to say that the pod race was maybe one of the highlight of the edit to me. So I guess humor is a strange thing
Many characters motivations are changed in this edit (Qui-Gon on tatooine was genious) and it really felt like a new ride.
I also think that all the work Frink did on his cutlists for a lot of other prequels fanedits helped him a lot to have in mind all the lines and all the
potential ridiculousness of the scenes.
All in all it was a very refreshing way to watch this movie (again…)
9/10 from me.
First I thought about a 8/10 rating because of the audio editing, but really, the amount of laugh during the viewing was too high, it needed an extra point.
PS: please find a way to bring back Rick Olié for the sequel!
He was a great help understanding some key scenes
Review by TMBTM — December 24, 2011 @ 6:02 pm
I’m very sorry to say but I really didn’t enjoy this one (but I really really really wanted to). It felt way too long and the majority of the humor didn’t make me laugh. There were some great parts in it, without a doubt, but on the whole it fell flat. The editing was very choppy a lot of the time. And while I understand that it wasn’t intended to be a masterpiece of editing, all the harsh audio cuts ended up taking me out of the edit too often.
But, the parts that did make me laugh were great. Specifically “The Distance”, the lines from “Airplane”, a lot of the subtitle jokes and Bender’s dialog made me LOL, ROFL, PSML and ROFLcopter (respectively).
Review by Neglify — January 1, 2012 @ 11:42 am
Sorry, just didn’t work for me. I admire the idea and even the execution, but I really couldn’t get into it, however much I wanted to.
The repeating clips I found particularly unfunny, and the constant (unavoidable?) cuts made it very difficult to follow the movie and to understand the (new) motivations of the characters.
A lot of it didn’t make sense to me – like Anni saying “are you an angel” to everyone. Is he retarded?
Also, the cuts were a bit too long, so everything seemed very slow. Cutting fast to the next dialogue would really have helped keep up the tempo.
I did like:
the video game sounds entering the Gungan city
the Darth Vader voice out of Anni
the new subtitles
the video game health bar in the final fight
“Obi Wan”
but, unfortunately I was really bored: Phantom is boring anyway – A new hope may have been better to do this with since the humour doesn’t have to carry the entire film.
I very much uhmmed and ahhed about writing this review because I really like Frink on the forums and felt like I was being somehow disloyal. Then I realised that this is a rating site, and some people LOVE certain movies, and others don’t, and people have different tastes and some people might find this review helpful.
Don’t take it personally Frink. Didn’t work for me, but others loved it. It certainly shows that we can expect more from Frink in the future. For what it’s worth, Congrats on your first edit!
Review by dangarratt — January 1, 2012 @ 11:08 pm
I’m writing an expanded review to explain more what I liked and didn’t like about the edit.
VIDEO EDITING. I don’t recall any stray frames. But, there was one sequence involving Qui-Gonn calling Captain Panaka (I think that’s his name) and asking for Obi-Wan repeatedly. It would cut from day to night back to day and I felt that was a little jarring. I know that it was done for the sake of the joke but it didn’t work for me and seemed like an unneeded cut. 9/10
AUDIO EDITING. In almost every scene new dialog is created for the characters, more so for Qui-Gonn and Obi-Wan. Frink lifted bits and pieces of dialog from a lot of different sources and to me it got to be quite annoying pretty quick. I understand that this was done to create a lot of humorous dialog and for most people they didn’t mind the harsh cuts in audio. But the cuts stood out too often for me to overlook them. I would give the audio editing a 2/10 because of all of abrupt cutting. For future edits I feel that if the audio cuts were smoother I would enjoy it more.
ENTERTAINMENT. This is another polarizing aspect of this edit in my opinion. Firstly, let me state that humor is mainly subjective. I don’t think anybody (or anything) can be universally funny. Some people may love a certain joke and some may hate it. That being said, the humor was very much hit-and-miss for me. Many jokes did not make me laugh. I felt that the entire edit was too long for my tastes and that it would have worked a lot better without so many repetitive jokes. I give the entertainment value a 3/10 due to how many of the jokes weren’t funny for me and I got bored too easily. I’m sorry, but the stuff that made me laugh couldn’t outweigh everything else.
I’m not going to give the DVD presentation a rating. It looked fine, but to me how good the DVD menus are doesn’t affect how I feel about the rating itself.
My three ratings (9, 2 & 3) average out to a 4.66. I admit I messed up in giving it a 4, I should have rounded up to a 5. My bad.
In the end, I will say that I know how much work Frink put into this edit and I do not want him to feel that I am attacking him. I know how it feels to be criticized harshly and I really don’t want one bad review to spoil all the positive ones. A lot of people loved the hell out of this edit and for that Frink should be commended.
Review by Neglify — January 2, 2012 @ 12:46 am
I’m sorry to say that this didn’t work out for me. Like everybody else I was extremely hyped to see this but I ended up disappointed; perhaps I over-hyped myself and expected another War of the Stars but most of the jokes fell flat and I found it difficult to finish the fanedit, frequently checking my watch.
The most difficult part was the audio editing, specifically the dialog; Frink reconstructed the dialog in almost every scene to tell a new story. It’s a great idea but one that’s better on paper; I guess Frink did the best he could to blend everything together and while the result is in theory funny, in practice it makes it difficult to follow the story and it completely pulled me out of the movie. Which is a shame because it’s obvious that a lot of work went into this.
The other thing I found obnoxious was the repetitive nature of a lot of the jokes; many were based on characters interrupting each other and being rude. It was funny once or twice; repeated all over the edit it was predictable and unfunny.
Some of the jokes did hit their mark and made me laugh but they were buried underneath too much choppy sound editing and too many repetitive or awkward humor. The entire thing felt to me like a bad Family Guy episode.
In my opinion this would have worked as a shorter fanedit; trimming the movie down to maybe an hour and only keeping the material that truly worked. But still, Frink has to be congratulated for effort alone, having changed just about every scene in the movie. For a firstling, this is truly impressive. I recommend this fanedit for die hard fans of Star Wars.
Review by blueyoda — January 2, 2012 @ 6:08 am
I’m afraid I’m in the boat with those who thought this idea was probably better on paper than in reality. The video editing was great (I enjoyed the funny transitions/wipes etc), but the audio editing was far too choppy for me. I found the laughs were few and far between for me, even though I was able to appreciate the effort that went into this grand production. It’s clear the film was intended to be in the vein of funny youtube clips like “Vader being an ass” where he keeps closing his ‘pod’… Many of the jokes felt like they were trying to replicate this style of humour. But trying to stretch this concept out over a whole film was hard to watch. Some of the humour works well, but for me, the majority felt forced and fell flat, particularly due to the hard audio cuts, and the fact that there were so many audio cuts. I most often had no idea what the characters were talking about – characters speaking nonsense for 2 hours is not that funny in my opinion. If this had been released as a series of funny clips from episode 1, just taking the funniest scenes as ’skits’, I think it would have worked better than trying to thread a whole movie together. But for originality and the immense creativity and effort required to put this whole thing together, drawing individual lines, songs and sounds from so many different sources, I’m giving this a 6/10.
Review by njvc — January 3, 2012 @ 9:11 am
What can I say that hasn’t been said already, I laughed from opening to end. Brave effort for a fisting and I suppose the humour reminds me of family guy a little, which probably explains why some people don’t like it. I think it deserves a better rating than it currently has and I urge more people see it.
I look forward to what projects you might bring us in the future
Review by Omaru1982 — January 4, 2012 @ 10:20 pm
Simply remarkable. Don’t have time to go into a full, in-depth review, but I did, in fact, spit out some of the food I was eating. Had to wipe off the screen.
I find myself wanting a sequel, if for no other reason to be able to say:
“Now there are two of them!”
Review by buddythegoon — January 5, 2012 @ 7:24 am
I haven’t laughed this hard all year.
Technical quality – 10/10 – audio and video were both fine.
Presentation – 10/10 – nice menu, nice cover art.
Editing – 7/10 – the video editing was flawless and just the fact that you merged all those different scenes and audio clips was incredible. I took off a couple points because the audio editing was so horrible, but you can’t really work around that.
Entertainment – 9/10 – I couldn’t stop laughing. The only non-hilarious parts were a few scenes on Coruscant and some of the ending battle. The rest of it was side-splitting. So many funny jokes. Sometimes they got repetitive but still. This was insanely funny. The soundtrack, the dubbing, the yippees, the podrace, the angel jokes, the droids, the video game health bars, Anakin’s father, the list goes on and on and on. So hilarious. I’ll definitely be recommending this one. Would have gotten a point higher if you had somehow been able to make the audio editing a bit smoother.
Overall – 8/10
Review by QuickCut — January 18, 2012 @ 5:43 am
Just to echo what others have said I found a lot of the gags to be unfunny though comedy is a selective taste. The consent choppy to the dialogue soon became annoying to the point I just wanted the Phantom Menace instead. While the Phantom Menace was lacking in plot the edit to me removed any and all story, if I’d never seen the Phantom Menace before I wouldn’t had a clue what was going on and who was who.
There are some great moments within the edit the pod race, Yoda snoring and Darth Maul’s walking on sunshine sketch are among the highlights though for every gag that worked I found there to be 10 gags that didn’t work.
The end credits are also a highlight as it shows the number people that have contributed to this edit. TV’s Frink really captured something special and it’s great that the fanedit community were able to help in contributing towards the edit. I also see this as the first of many edits that spoofs a well known film.
Overall it’s worth seeing though I don’t have any desire to watch it again, would have preferred a more shorter 80min film instead as I found it to be a bit of drag 5/10
Review by leeroy0115 — January 24, 2012 @ 7:44 pm
I’ve been around this project from the beginning and I understand some of the frustrations expressed by a few of the reviewers. There are a fair amount of ‘inside jokes’ in this edit which may be lost on the casual viewer. This edit is meant for the pretty serious fan of Star Wars, the kind who have the movies memorized. If this is your first exposure to Star Wars, you don’t have a chance of understanding what is going on. There is also a healthy dose of internet and ‘meme’ subculture. There is no worry about the plot, continuity has been thrown out the window and Frink has masterly thumbed his nose at the film. I get the insider jokes and Frink has done them to perfection. I lol’d.
I have to give TV’s Fink a lot of credit for such an ambitious task. He took the movie and asked “Will it blend?” The mix is choppy at times and small parts maybe hard to swallow, but I found myself chugging the whole thing. I hadn’t smiled while watching anything Star Wars prequel relate in a long time. Will this become my prefered version of The Phantom Menace? Well, yes. I sold my official version of TPM to some fanboy for $17 dollars. And my official tape is in a box in the shed. Deal with it.
Video quality: 9 of 10.
Audio quality: 6 of 10. Choppy at best at times, but most of the jokes are worth the trouble.
Overall review 8/10.
Review by Mark — January 28, 2012 @ 10:46 pm
My cousin said this:
“OH MY GOSH. That was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen! I loved pretty much every part of the lightsaber duel, especially ‘macho man’ and ‘NOOOOOO!’ I also like the part where Anakin is flying around after the podrace with the music.”
Review by QuickCut — February 3, 2012 @ 3:13 am
I don’t want to sound like I’m attacking the editor, because I’m not. This is just my opinion. I really wasn’t a fan of this one. It wears out its welcome pretty quickly. It sort of reminded me of GeneralGrin’s TNG edits on YouTube, which I like, but what makes them good is that they’re short. This just gets super boring because of the length. I only found myself chuckling a few times. They say humor is subjective, and I guess that’s true. Most of the jokes I just didn’t find funny at all. That said, I do appreciate all the work that went into this.
Score: 5 out of 10.
Review by DriggyDriggs — February 18, 2012 @ 3:54 am