Lost for Dummies

Thanks to the themachine for the heads up.

AS all "Lost" fans know, the show's storyline is a spa ghetti tangle of flashbacks, flash forwards and a lot of baffling stuff happening in between.

As the series zig-zags towards its mystery-explaining final season next year, a curious thing has happened: fans are starting to clamor for a chronological re-cut to help them put into perspective everything that's happened over the 120 episodes that will have aired since its premiere in 2004.

Nikki Stafford, author of the "Finding Lost" unofficial guide books, says that the notion of a chronological cut of the series is a topic that's been popping up on her blog, Nik at Nite, and elsewhere more frequently these days.

"Is there a demand for it? Absolutely," she says. "As someone who's seen every episode seven or eight times, if they offered me a chronological cut, I would watch it 100 percent -- it would be fun to watch the whole way through."

There are some problems with doing a sequential cut of "Lost" though, starting with the hassle of someone having to go through a minimum of 100 hours of footage with a fine-tooth comb.

There's also the fact that since all the time-traveling and flashbacks are told in bite-sized clips, "there's no disassembling and reassembling of the show that would feel organic," says Entertainment Weekly senior writer Jeff Jensen, the magazine's resident "Lost" expert.

Consequently, a narrator would probably be required to fill in the blanks.

Of course, "Lost" could always take a cue from Francis Ford Coppola, who re-edited the entire "Godfather" trilogy into a single movie, telling the story straight through from 1901 to 1980. To make the narrative flow, Coppola spliced in additional footage that wasn't in the films' original theatrical releases.

Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment didn't have anything to say on the prospect of a chronological cut of the series. However, the fourth season DVD included a bonus feature which cut together, in sequence, all the flash forward scenes that appeared during that season.

"There's no question they will do [a chronological cut] and they should do it," says Jensen. "This is the marvelous gift that 'Lost' is to [the studio]. They have a complete story and, without a doubt, for the next 10 years, we're going to see 'Lost' repackaged in various formats and ways."

Jensen points to the example set by 20th Century Fox, which did well repackaging DVD sets of cult series "The X-Files" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" to highlight specific characters or mythology-only episodes.

"If the people at Walt Disney Home Video sat down [to talk about future DVD plans] now," Jensen says, "a chronological depiction of 'Lost' will probably be on their Top 10 list."

Source: NY Post