mverta said:

I hadn't given it much thought until recently, when I noticed an extreme amount of jitter in the title card, which I have from two absolutely confirm-able 1977 sources, which are identical to each other. What's odd is that the GOUT title card element is much straighter and smoother in its motion. Stabilizing my 1977 elements doesn't yield the GOUT result; they have internally different characteristics. If I didn't know better, I'd say either 1) GOUT was indeed a recreation or 2) There was a second, more stable version of the title card created after the initial release in 1977, but before the 1981 re-release and re-do, which GOUT is based upon.

This is actually not that hard to believe, as they went trough the trouble of revising the end credits, there's a possibility they could also have used a more stable version of the crawl on later prints. Maybe a closer examination of all the '77 sources will tell us something.