The laserdisc footage was darkened a bit, but not super heavily. It was very hard to match the oversaturated colors and darkness of the official DVDs, the 2004 was a very odd print created through digital messing-with-ness.
The entire 2004 print was brightened up for my release, and when you create DVDs, well, black levels are the bane of a DVD creator's existence. When you encode something, certain programs (FCP) loooove to suddenly raise your black levels an incredible amount. To create Classic Edition I actually had to bring the black levels DOWN so the encoder could bring them up again. Perfect black was hard to create without losing picture information. Looked fine on my TV but then my TV does crush blacks down a bit.
I find a lot of newer TVs bring black levels WAY up, tune 'em down folks. =) Do adjust your set?
Oddly, I haven't had this problem with ESB Classic, the black levels seem fine without tweaking, not sure why. I'm sure now somebody's gonna come in and say the black levels on ESB Classic are awful. =) But certainly black levels are the hardest thing, and many DVD players (like my current one) have options to change the black level during playback which just makes things more confusing!
Glad you liked the edit - all the best. Enjoy Empire Classic too if it comes round your way.
Keep circulating the discs people.