Get ready for Star Wars: The Force Awakens by watching these 'anti-cheese' edits of the prequels

With less than a week until the premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, you may be readying yourself by rewatching the movies that preceded it. Whether it's canonical order, order of release or the "Machete order," if your viewing plans include the prequels (Episodes 1 to 3) may I suggest these "anti-cheese" edits?

They are the work of YouTuber JeremyMWest-Esquire (as pointed out by Polygon reader nat3S in yesterday's post about Return of the Jedi's beginning). These are all three of The Phantom Menace, The Clone Wars and Revenge of the Sith, with all of their most eye-rolling moments edited.

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It's not just cutting scenes or muting dialogue. The execrable, idiotic Neimoidian voices are replaced with unintelligible alien gibberish in The Phantom Menace's edit, and you'd be amazed just how much better it sounds. JeremyMWest even makes a valiant attempt to modulate Padme's ostentatious voice in her Amidala persona (but fails to alter her gratuitous, overacted British accent). "All fart and poop jokes removed," he says, along with "as many 'yippe!' and 'whoa!' and 'whee!' references as possible." Even better — "Midichlorian references removed."

With all of this shit chopped out, it still clocks in at a respectable 92 minutes. See for yourself!

In Attack of the Clones, "Anakin and Padme's scenes were drastically edited to make Anakin way less whiny and petulant," which had to be a Sisyphean task. He also wiped out Anakin's breakdown after killing a bunch of Sandpeople nobody gave a crap about anyway. The YouTube page has a full list of all the b.s. removed, and de-cheesed Attack of the Clones is still nearly two hours.

Revenge of the Sith, yes, eliminates the ridiculous "Noooooooo!" scene at the end, as well as Padme's unctuous "liberty dying to thunderous applause" line. Also, in this edit, Padme dies because Anakin killed her, alright? Because that's what actually happened. None of this baloney about losing the will to live. There's a ton more in the editing notes at the YouTube page.

It's as thankless a job as one could imagine for a Star Wars fan. My edit of The Phantom Menace would be something like this, for example.

But if we're not going to get full reboots to repair the damage done by these abominations (and I still think there are secret plans for that), this work is the next best thing.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens premieres Dec. 18, and let's all pray it doesn't need this kind of treatment later.

Check out the Star Wars Force Awakens teaser trailer