The Rook-Free Alien: Romulus, Solo: A Star Wars Story, and Miami Vice Alternate Cuts mentioned in the 1941 episode of Blank Check! (now with Tartakovsky Clone Wars too!)
Hello there!
Firstly, just wanted to say thank you very, very much to the hosts and the guests, for taking a slight detour during the 1941 episode into the fanedit cul-de-sac, to discuss some of my tinkerings! It was a real trip to suddenly hear about my experiments in critical presumptiousness via the re-cutting of thousands of people's hard work, and to hear that those experiments apparently passed muster, and then to get a special request on top of that!
Unfortunately: 1941 is completely unsalvageable as a movie, and I probably won't be re-editing Dumbo into it and adding yet another hour to its runtime, or re-editing Dumbo to have Robert Stack popping into view every now and again like some sort of giggling/crying Tyler Durden.
BUT! I did want to say thanks, and to also directly address any questions I've been getting all week about the edits via PM and DM, and also make it a little easier for people to ask and have answered any questions about the edits, and about fanediting in general.
The easiest way to get details on my edits (there are four of them!) is to just link to my editor page at the IFDB, which is like the IMDB, but for people who have decided that instead of doing jigsaw puzzles or sudoku, they want to become amateur Michael Kahn's and spend months pulling apart movies and putting them back together again. There are also reddit threads at the r/fanedits subreddit for each of the four edits: Alien Romulus - Alternate Cut, Solo: A Star Wars Story (Alternate Cut), Miami Vice - The Miami Nice Cut, and Star Wars: Clone Wars - The Legends Cut. Either way, you'll find the best way to request links to those edits is through PMs/DMs here on reddit, or directly emailing me through gmail.
It's been quite a few of you that's already reached out and gotten some of these edits, and again: THANK YOU for giving them your time, it very much means a lot considering how that time could otherwise be spent; to be gambling it on watching someone you don't know from a can of paint, trying to "fix" a movie you already know has problems, or in some cases, a movie you already like JUST FINE the way it is, that's a big bet, and thanks for placing it on these cuts! If you've grabbed any of my edits because of this episode - Please leave a review, or feedback or any questions here in the thread, about what you saw, or why I did the stuff I did, and I'll do my best to answer as clearly as I can!
While I'm here: I'd be remiss not to shout out some of my own favorite fanedits, and I think others should do the same as well; while also acknowledging that it's right to be skeptical of them in general - it's a LOT of them that aren't very good, or are being done by people who don't really know what they're doing, and are doing them just so they can see their name in a title sequence or to get attention in a forum somewhere for "fixing" some nerd property. But there ARE a few that are legitimately transformative works - not just as pieces of film criticism, which is strangely, how fanediting tends to work best, but as filmic works in and of themselves.
Paradise (by Job Willins) - I think this is my favorite of all time, it combines Prometheus and Covenant into a single movie that's all about David and Walter and makes the "alien origin" thing a background thing completely. It takes the two movies Scott was making and distills them down into a single narrative so cleanly and artfully it's kind of a miracle of editing - My Romulus edit inserts some Covenant material in it, but when I was doing it, they were more like references to THIS than the original film.
The Hobbit (M4 Book Edit) - this might be the 2nd most fanedited thing ever next to the Star Wars prequels, which effectively kicked off the whole fanedit phenomenon in the first place. This is the best, most accomplished version of editing Jackson's trilogy into a single film (with intermission!)
Blade Runner (The Penultimate Cut) by Take Me 2 Your Cinema - an example of the painstaking work some faneditors do vs the sort of slapdash stuff fanedits can be known for (i.e. "anti-cheese, anti-cringe, etc") The changelist alone is eye-watering, especially once you realize the changes aren't really changes.
And of course, Peet Gelderblom's Raising Cain re-cut and Spicediver's Dune: Alternative Edition Redux, both of which are the only fanedits I'm aware of that have been included on official physical releases as legitimate alternate cuts of the movie, with Geldberblom's edit being dubbed the official Director's Cut.
Apologies for how long this has gotten! I'll stop here so it doesn't send anyone into a coma, or inspire anyone to fanedit my post. Thanks again for the shout-out and the love, and I'm standing by for any feedback, questions, complaints... whatever you got, I'm ready!