But I watched the original ANH and ESB the other night and I gotta tell ya... somehow they just seemed BETTER to me. The models, Clive Revill's voice, the original matte paintings, the monkeywoman, it all just rocked my socks. It also blows my mind what ILM was able to pull off with such limited resources, something that gets lost in the CGI brouhaha of the '97/'04 editions.
That's not saying the SE flicks don't have their moments (the expanded approach to Cloud City in ESB, for one) but if it has to be one or the other, for the first time I'd probably stick with the originals.
Every Vaseline blob under Luke's speeder, every jacked up matte line, every translucent box around the space ships, every flickering lightsaber, every effect in the originals tells a story -- even if unintentionally so.
I want that story preserved.