As you may have gathered from a previous post of mine, I’m no fan of the “Special Edition” changes that George Lucas has made to ‘Star Wars’. Any of them. With each passing year, he keeps making more and more little tweaks, each more annoying than the last. At a certain point, he might as well just remake the movie entirely in CG animation exactly how he wants it. In fact, he probably will. In the meantime, a large group of fans have taken up a similar challenge and made their own version of ‘Star Wars’ shot-by-shot, in unique 15-second increments. At its best, the result is a lot more creative and inspiring than the entire prequel trilogy. At its worst, well, it’s still not as bad as ‘The Phantom Menace’.

For the ‘Star Wars Uncut’ project, fans from across the internet were tasked with remaking 15-second clips from the first ‘Star Wars’ in any way they wanted. Some of the submissions are animated, some stop motion, and quite a few of them just a bunch of obnoxious nerds cosplaying in their back yards. Some of the new scenes are utterly brilliant, and others just insufferable. It’s a big mixed bag.

Recently, the winning entries were stitched together into a complete movie, which you can watch here. If sitting for the whole thing is too tedious (and, admittedly, it can be), the site also offers an option to watch just the Top 50 scenes. You can even choose to watch the movie synched to the original ‘Star Wars’ soundtrack, which is pretty neat.

Here’s one of the cooler sample scenes:

And look, Han shoots first!

If you’re interested, you better watch ‘Star Wars Uncut’ fast. Something makes me suspect that Lucasfilm might slap a copyright claim against the site any minute now.