Another “See how much better the new SE version is” tactic.
Yeah, we’ll give you the originals but in the worst possible form that we can get away with - just to spite you all. At the time Lucas had said something like, “let’s see how well they do”, implying that no-one would want them and with such blatant sabotage at play, that outcome wouldn’t have been a surprise.
If only the 1993 LD masters had been taped over. Even the old Japanese LD transfers looked better.