Interesting parallel - Star Wars prequels edited into single feature

I wonder what they'd think of a film edited using Classic sci-fi films??

"... Topher Grace is a film geek. He loves the Star Wars films, the Back to the Future movies and all the same signature titles of any film geek who grew up in the 1980s. He recently became interested in the editing process and wanted to learn more about the art form. Instead of cutting a short film, he wanted to use something he was more familiar with.
His idea was to edit the Star Wars prequels into one movie, as they would provide him a lot of footage to work with. He used footage from all three prequels, a couple cuts from the original trilogy, some music from The Clone Wars television series, and even a dialogue bit from Anthony Daniels’ (C-3PO) audio book recordings. He even created a new opening text crawl to set up his version of the story."

Here's the rest: http://www.slashfilm.com/topher-grace-edited-star-wars-prequels-85minute-movie/

Nice paragraphs on Special Effects, then and now.

I can't vouch for the rest of this article from the Onion AV Club, but I do love the opening paragraphs:

The trajectory of Peter Jackson’s career—from the homemade slapstick gore of Meet The Feebles, Bad Taste, and Dead Alive to the refined studio spectacle of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, King Kong, and The Lovely Bones—has been a case study in how special effects have changed, if not necessarily improved. Back when he was cobbling together those hilarious little creature features in New Zealand in the late ’80s and early ’90s, all the money and expertise in the world wouldn’t have given Jackson the resources to render the films’ stop-motion and puppet effects in CGI. And who would want to do that, anyway? By the same token, the Helm’s Deep sequence in The Two Towers has a level of pixelated detail that wouldn’t be possible in stop-motion—and who would want to do that, anyway?

Yet the thinking of these effects is often wrong, and Jackson’s fervent embrace of new technologies as a Hollywood filmmaker hasn’t helped matters. The important point isn’t that effects have gotten better, and that CGI is somehow superior to stop-motion, but that they’re different, and audiences respond to them differently. Who, besides maybe Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman, would argue that Rob Bottin’s spectacularly grotesque stop-motion creations for John Carpenter’s 1982 version of The Thing are inferior to the fluid ones-and-zeroes of 2011’s remake? Yet it would be inconceivable for a stop-motion version of The Thing or any other science-fiction/horror film to be financed by a studio in 2012, for fear that the effects would poke out from the visual fabric of the rest of the film. Gleiberman used the word “fake,” but why should we put a premium on realism when it comes to effects? Effects are not necessarily diminished by the audience recognizing them as effects. No one ever mistook Ray Harryhausen’s creations for seamless photorealism or Nick Park’s thumbprint-pocked Claymation wonders for the fluidity of computer animation. And yet they’re pleasing in ways that CGI could never be, perhaps because they’re so handcrafted and personal.

Read the rest, which is about Peter Jackson's film Dead Alive (which, again, is not endorsed by me or mine) here.