Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, and today’s topic is…maybe a little messy, but it’s an idea I had with a nerdy interest of mine, so I wanted to try and tackle it today. So, first things first, let’s discuss fan-edits.

Cut From A Different Cloth

Fan-edits are a somewhat fascinating idea if you’ve never encountered them, and a RELATIVELY new one, in terms of widespread acceptance and visibility. They are, as their name implies, edits made by fans. Specifically, they are typically movies that have been re-edited by amateurs to achieve some kind of goal. One of the earliest ones to get famous in this regard was Mike J Nichol’s “The Phantom Edit”, an edit of The Phantom Menace that cut about 20 minutes from the film (about 15% of the movie’s run-time). The cut was reported by many to “remove Jar Jar”, a noble and respectable goal, but which is incorrect: it downplayed Jar Jar, but that was as part of a broader desire to trim a lot of repetitive exposition, a lot of the more childish slapstick humor, and, interestingly, re-framing Anakin as a more active and slightly menacing character: no longer is Anakin’s destruction of the Trade Federation ship at the end of the movie an accident (And yes, I am asking you to remember a 20 second plot detail from a 20 year old movie, this is how toxic nerd culture works: remember every second of every nerd property, or be exiled), instead now he willingly and intentionally does it: This 10 year old kid now intuitively understood how to fly the droid vessel, and used it to take out the critical command center.

Looking up the specs online, that means that Anakin had likely killed 25 people, and THOUSANDS of droids before he was 12.

There are TONS of these projects out there now, serving a variety of different purposes and ideas. The Hobbit Movies in particular are a favorite target for the enterprise: nigh on everyone, including the creators and actors in the movies, agree they’re too long, and weirdly paced, and were far from a perfect creation. So fans have torn the almost 9 hours of movie over 3 extended editions APART, and rebuilt them in a variety of ways, like kids playing with Legos. There’s a version that took the extended editions and cut them from 9 hours down to 7, using the extended scenes in place of existing ones to make a “better” “normal” version. (What a great reason to have to use quotation marks around better and normal there) There’re versions that take all 3 non-extended movies and condense them into one 4-hour movie. It’s about taking the movie that’s there, and making it into what you want it to be.

Fan-edits can come about for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, they’re experiments in film, like “I’m going to take movie X, and make it Black and White,” or “Make it a silent film” or “change the order of the scenes” This was actually one of the first versions I personally encountered: back when the first Avengers movie was coming out, there were MULTIPLE fan-edits for how to best experience all the movies leading up to it. I personally watched the Avenger Initiative, a project that assembled ALL of phase 1 Marvel into a single (12ish hour) experience, with most/all of the scenes in chronological order. So you start with the long-ago flashback in Thor, then watch Captain America, then Iron Man, as it goes on, movies start to overlap. It’s pretty cool. For a more experimental version, there’s “Thor: Odinson?” which recuts the first Thor movie so that we follow Natalie Portman meeting a weird drifter who claims to be Thor, but we don’t know he IS until later. Which is a fun way to play with a movie: Like, IS Memento still an interesting/good movie if you change the order of the scenes? Do other movies work if you mess with the order like they do in Memento? How many times can you say “memento” before it loses all meaning? Memento. Mentos. Memento. I think I lost it already.)

I can’t tell if this is a repurposed poster, or a unique creative work, but the post for Malthus’s Odinson is pretty rad, as a way to refresh the mind after it gets Memento’d.

Another fairly common experiment is “what if I took this TV show and re-cut its main storylines into movies?” There’s an edit of Season 2 of Game of Thrones that turns the 9 hours of TV into a single 3 hour movie. Is it good? I don’t know: full disclosure, I didn’t know very much about fan-edits at all until I watched a video on them on Nebula this past week (you can see it on YouTube here) I knew they EXISTED, and could have listed a couple prominent examples: the “Avengers Initiative” mentioned earlier, I knew about the 4-hour Hobbit cut, and actually HAVE the 7.5 hour Hobbit cut, I knew vaguely of “the Phantom Edit”, I know Topher Grace supposedly made an edit of Spiderman 3, etc. So full credit to the Royal Ocean Film Society for pushing me down this rabbit hole, and a lot of the examples (particularly of the mysterious, as-of-yet-unrevealed THIRD category) are lifted straight from that video.

SO you have your experimental versions of films. But more common are the fan-edits made to “fix” a movie: edits that go in with the express goal of changing the movie to be ‘better’: Like the Hobbit examples, there are fan-edits of the Lord of the Rings that remove anything in the movies NOT expressly in the books. That suggested vision of the Phantom Edit of removing Jar Jar from the prequels is a “FanFix”, as some call these style of edit. You can also see much smaller fixes, such as the Rise of Skywalker: Ascendant, which only shortens the movie by 4 minutes, and mostly changes backgrounds for continuity purposes/cuts for slightly better flow. Or huge ones: another fan-edit is working to condense each of the 3 “Skywalker Saga” trilogies into 1 trilogy of three movies.

Apparently to achieve this, they had to cut out most of Jabba the Hutt. As a Hutt, I find that choice perfectly understandable. Jabba always was a blowhard.

The most insane/interesting/rare version of fan-edits are “restorations” of a work. Some movies, to put it bluntly, get fucked, from a far more agreed-upon perspective. To return to the Star Wars well, the various ways the original trilogy has been remastered/altered over the years is incredibly frustrating to some. Like, “Han Shot First” is a big thing in Star Wars, that I REALLY don’t have time to…alright, just a taste: Original 1977 Star Wars, in the cantina scene, Han argues with an alien named Greedo, and shoots him. When the film was remastered in 1997, Lucas changes the scene to Greedo shooting first, and Han returning fire and killing him. Lucas insists this was always how the movies was MEANT to be, he just had to rush it out unfinished, a point supported by none of the scripts or actors. This has been tweaked literally every subsequent new release of films, as recently as 2019, when they appeared on Disney Plus with Greedo speaking a never-before-uttered line of dialogue. Crazy shit.

If your nerd friends were really mad about “maclunkey” in 2019, now you know why.

So some fans have put in the time to “Despecialize” the original trilogy, taking the better resolution of newer releases, but pulling out all the scenes and stuff Lucas added afterward, and using modern tech to “enhance” older scenes to match the new resolution. For an even wilder version, one fan edit of the film “Raising Cain” is now technically canon: Director Brian de Palma made the film in the 90’s, and had to take it from a non-chronological initial script into a more conventional movie when he was unable to make the movie “work” the way it was written. Learning this fact years later, a Dutch director hunted down the original script, and edited the movie as produced to match the initial vision as much as possible, and uploaded it online…which De Palma saw, and LOVED, declaring it “what I wanted the movie to be”. THAT edit is now the official “Director’s Cut” of Raising Cain, which you can now watch if you buy the Blu-Ray of the movie.

(As a small technical note: fan-edits are in a weird legal grey area. Like, they are pretty obviously some kind of IP violation…but no one’s 100% sure where the line is. (Like, I haven’t heard any stories of Lucas having to pay the director/editors of Empire Strikes Back when he changed the ending of that one, which was probably technically the same kind of IP issue.) As such, the “best practices” of such edits are that creators do ask that, before you download or watch a Fan-edit, you buy the official release: that way, they can directly say “I’m not harming the creator’s financial interests, I’m not profiting off of another person’s IP, this is a transformative work based off theirs.”)

Getting to the Meat of the Matter

So, all of that is cool, (or well, at least complicated/interesting. “Cool” is a bit of a stretch.) and maybe you’re now interested in hunting down like, “Avatar the Last Airbender, but redubbed so people say fucking “Avatar” and “Aang” correctly”.

I like Jackson Rathbone. But MAN do I hate him as Sokka.

But, you might reasonably ask: what has it got to do with Food? And my answer there that I have links to two recipes for you to take a quick look at. The first one is the Bon Appetit page for their version of za’atar crusted chicken cutlets, and the second is this Monday’s post, a recipe BASED ON the Bon Appetit one, but also fairly clearly “not the same recipe”. And while this is the most vivid example I can think of on the site in recent memory, it’s by no means the only one: if you go back and check my sources, there are plenty of times a new ingredient or two pops up, or some ingredient needs to be replaced. And the thing is…when you know what you’re doing, EVERY recipe is something of a “fan-edit” of the original. Swapping an ingredient for a food sensitivity, and the necessary changes in seasoning and cook times, is the culinary equivalent of “let’s cut out this character I can’t stand” in a fan-edit.

Once I get rid of that dumb lizard, I can finally enjoy the 2014 Godzilla movie.

You wanna make a dish less spicy than originally intended? There are fan-edits that cut out violence or ‘unnecessary’ gore/profanity. You wanna dish that’s MORE spicy? There are edits that include the bloodiest parts, or that cut “all that boring plot stuff”.

And it occupies that same technical grey area: as I’ve mentioned before, you can’t copyright a recipe. That’s one of the reasons that secret recipes are guarded so fiercely: if I DO find out your exact recipe, you can’t stop me from using it. But while the recipe itself isn’t protectable, things like “how you write out the steps, or talk about it” can be.

So I just want to re-affirm to you all that, just as amateurs and professionals can riff on each other’s films and TV shows, there’s nothing wrong with you taking a recipe made by a professional (or a schmuck like me) and editing it to suit your tastes. So long as that movie isn’t Paddington 2, and, logically, the recipe isn’t Orange Marmalade.