DVD Releases and News

Fan Edits Cut Movies the Way They Should Have Been

The first we heard of fan edits was back when "Star Wars: Episode 1" was released, where the public outcry against Jar Jar Binks could be heard echoing 'round the globe in a firestorm of geek fury. One fan was outraged enough that he actually took the time to re-edit the movie to his liking, removing or editing all the Jar Jar scenes, clipping the politics, rearranging scenes to the Old Trilogy style, and just all-around making Episode 1 a better experience for many viewers that deigned to download "The Phantom Edit."

Today, in our stumbling around the interweb that we so often do (it's all for work, ahem), we ran across several sites that were homes to fan edits of not just "The Phantom Menace," but a whole slew of films. And these are not edits where someone took a home camcorder and inserted their own scenes; rather, these are edited in a professional manner to either cut away cheesy or excess material, or adding in deleted scenes from various other sources, such as official extended version DVDs that were released from studios.

Take for example the description of this re-cut "Daredevil," a movie that, even with the Director's Cut, was sorely in need of more editing:

* Shorter running time (1 hr. 56 min.)

* The opening scene of DD in the church is removed. The film begins with Matt in the court room with Quesada.

* Origin story is spread out throughout the film and is much, much shorter.

* The Matt/Elektra playground fight is a lot shorter and a lot less ridiculous.

* The Kingpin's hip-hop introduction is cut.

* That horrible CGI shot of DD kicking Bullseye is a lot shorter.

* That horrid Evanescence song is removed from the Elektra training scene. It is now replaced with "Session" by Linkin Park, which fits the sequence very well. Before everyone moans about Linkin Park, this song is instrumental.

* Most of Matt's voice overs are removed, except for the stuff towards the end.

* This is kind of trivial, but it always bothered me: When Ben Urich hits delete on his keyboard to erase his story, he taps it once and erases the whole story, rather than holding it down. I have now changed it so it looks like he holds the button down. It's stupid, but it always annoyed me.

* A few little cuts and trims and re-ordering of shots, to keep the pace and make everything work.

As you can see, quite a bit of work is done to make the movie more palatable to people that almost liked certain films. Menus and DVD-resolution are retained on the original footage to give you that feel that this is the way the movie actually rolled out to stores upon release. A multitude of other titles have been redone, including "Spiderman" 1, "King Kong", "Superman Returns", the "Matrix" sequels, and a whole lot more.

How legal is all this? Well, the hosting parties of these edits try to squirm around the rules by stating: "You must own the original movie before downloading any FanEdited movie. We here at FanEdit.org respect the company's copyrights, and don't want to infringe on any company's rights." While we're not sure how successful they would be if the Cease-and-Desist lawyers came a-knockin', we guess it runs along the lines of certain Fair Use gaming sites that detail how to make back-up copies of video games "for personal use only."

Whatever the case, we're jonesing to get ahold of one these and check it out for ourselves. Just how much of a difference do these re-cuts really make on films that were questionable to begin with? The only way to find out, it seems, is to take the plunge and download a copy.

Have you seen a fan edit? Let us know the results in the comments!

Link: FanEdit.org

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Posted by on February 16, 2007 4:12 PM
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