Darth Editous said:

So I'm looking at the GOUT crawl for ANH - y'know, the one missing the whole "Episode IV/A New Hope" bit. I've got a vague memory of reading that the GOUT crawl is actually a modern recreation - the opening logo is a much straighter version than on the "later" crawl, and the lines of the crawl are split differently - because the rest of the GOUT is based on a laserdisc master that did have "A New Hope" on it.

The opening crawl on the '06 Bonus disc is not a recreation, if they really went through such an unnecessary and tedious effort, I must say they did an extremely well done recreation because the opening is a completely perfect match down to every little small detail, the compositing of the crawl, starfield, planets, ships, lasers, impacts and mattelines are exact.

Darth Editous said:

Also, the GOUT crawl doesn't show the same "bend" at the bottom right that the special editions and later (and possibly earlier) do. Did they just do a poor job when they made the "Episode IV crawl" in 1980?

The specific angle of the original '77 crawl was what both Empire and Jedi emulated, when they did the revised ANH crawl the angle was for some reason different, ironically introducing a new inconsistency with the other crawls, which basically have become Lucas' staple over the years, as soon as he tries to fix something another thing gets broken. The revised crawl also came out a little bit skewed and have been so since '81. They did a nice job with the recomposited ships to get rid of the thick matteline around the Stardestroyer but the flaws already mentioned combined with different timing causing the music not match the visuals makes the whole thing poorly done. The '81 starfield was also taken from Empire, in '97 they went back to the original starfield and recomposited all the elements digitally.

EDIT: Sorry for my bullshit about the different angle, did take take a look at the '81 crawl and the angle isn't that much different from the sequels, ignore what I said. ;)