Yes they were fantastic looking in the theaters and i don't remember seeing Vader with a pink saber in Empire or Jedi which i saw twice.
They were restored photochemically and by hand mostly be Both YCM Labs and Pacific Title. All color correction i believe was done in house at ilm so it is very possible the weird colors existed back then and i just did not see them in the theater. You know no multiple viewings pause and freeze frame and all that.
Home Video and theatrical film are too very seperate things. But whoever was in charge of checking things for the home video release really screwed up and things have not changed since then, remember the lack of quality control over the definitive collection which led to the gout dvnr debacle.
The truest to the theatrical release in terms of image quality for home video had very little to do with Lucas since it was the japan special collection carried out by 20th Century Fox Japan branch, i think Lucas just signed off early on on licensing the films to fox for foreign releases. Or was that in the original contract between lucas and fox? Even the first us widescreen releases were lazily taken from the same video master all they did was crop off the subtitles or white them out and try to center the picture haphazardly.
The first true us widescreen releases did not come til 1993 in the Lucas approved THX digitally mastered versions and the so called remastering was just dvnr scrubbing of the image and color correction.
These problems would have been less noticeable on vhs and laserdisc than dvd however since they have a much softer image. The problem with dvd is early on the format reproduced every fault that was in a laserdisc or vhs transfer because of the sharper image. And obviously if the gout looks awful on dvd how much worse would it look upscaled to blu ray resolution.
You would have to be a true home video enthusiast to know just what a middle finger the gout was to people, i have that already on laserdisc. What i wanted was restored versions of the true theatrical releases with 5.1 mixes derived from the 6 track mixes and anamorphic like the film prints. Instead we got a lazy re-issue of an already done transfer just dumped on the newest format. Hell even that is only partially true since HD video was already viable in 2006, and the tenth anniversary of the dvd format was in dec of 2007. Last year. Lucas is such a slow poke that the 1997 special edition debut on Laserdisc in the same year as the introduction of dvd,lol.
Blu Ray has been the winner of the format wars since early this year and 20th Century Fox was an early adopter of Blu. Yet we still have no star wars on Blu Ray.
Since Blu Ray is reaching acceptance all the tv shows and movies of the studios are not far behind, even japan is releasing its backcatalog of anime on blu. Peter Jackson is working on the lotr release. Again where is star wars?