To answer another question, the PAL laserdiscs are more tightly framed, this means that when you put the NTSC version and the PAL version side by side, that some of the picture is missing on the PAL version - you could think of it as the PAL version is a bit more 'zoomed in' so some of the picture has fallen off the bottom of the screen so to speak.
I've been working on a different PAL to NTSC project recently. The source was originally NTSC that was PAL-ified and I am re-NTSC-ify-ing it.
In the process I ran into the same thing: tighter framing. In fact a lot of the names in the opening credits were lost in the overscan area when I was done. What it looks like (and I'd really love if someone can verify authoritatively on this) that they cut off a percentage of the left and right portions of the frame and then just enlarged what's left in order to get instant PAL resolution.
Now back to the PAL Star Wars: although the laserdiscs should IN THEORY have been derivied from a film source, I'm wondering if they started with some form of 480 line master that they did this butcher-jobber thing to. It would explain the tighter cropping and mean that any NTSC conversion of Moth3r's DVD would have to involve adding vertical black borders to prevent further loss in the overscan area of a TV (which is what I'm doing with my other project).
Anyone?