For a good laugh, check out the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article 'Phantom Menace' caper began to unravel from the very start describing the experience of the four drunk individuals who stole the Star Wars print. Here's a portion.

When they pulled the 40-pound film, which was 3 to 4 feet in diameter, from the projector it started unspooling.

They panicked and dropped it on the floor. Frantically snatching it up, the four lugged all 40,000 feet of film to a car owned by the mother of two of the men to make their getaway.

"We've got somebody trying to carry out this big mass of film and somehow it started to unravel and there's film all over the place and these boys are stuffing the film into a car," Steans said. "One of them described it as being so much that when he got in the car, his feet wouldn't touch the pedals."

With film hanging out the windows and stuck in the car doors, the four drove away from State Cinema 4 in downtown Menomonie, stopping along the way to push the evidence back into the car after they realized they were trailing the precious film. They drove to the home of two of the thieves and decided they had to get rid of their fingerprints.

So they put the film in a bathtub and tried to wash away their telltale prints. But that proved to be quite a task, so they ended up cutting "The Phantom Menace" into many pieces, putting them into three garbage bags and a trash can.

The quartet discussed burying or burning the movie but were afraid that they couldn't prove to police that they didn't sell it.