DrDre said: The OOT bootleg market is non-existent.
That’s definitely not true.
Really? Type either Despecialized or Silver Screen Edition in Ebay, and you will find only two or three sellers attempting to sell Despecialized, and none trying to sell the Silver Screen Edition. If nobody is buying and or selling, there is no market (market = an actual or nominal place where forces of demand and supply operate, and where buyers and sellers interact).
There are bootlegs, which are shared through torrent sites, but that is another matter. Before the release of the OOT on DVD, there were literally dozens of sellers on Ebay (mostly from Asia, where pirating laws are lenient or absent) mostly attempting to sell bootleg copies of the OOT in varying quality.
I think there’s a pretty good argument to be made that the rise of torrent sites and the ease of obtaining pretty much anything for free on the internet is probably the thing that has killed the bootleg market. Why would I buy a bootlet on a physical medium when I can get a (likely superior) portable digital copy at no cost?
I was on BBSes as far back as the early 1990s, but movie sharing didn’t really become a thing until the early/mid-00s when people started getting fast enough broadband. Downloading a movie over a dial-up connection or even ISDN line was just too painfully slow to ever catch on.