Why was the Lowry "restoration" even necessary. I mean wouldn't most people have been pretty happy with the quality of an anamorphic transfer from the 1997 prints?

Remember, most of the Empire of Dreams footage is from the 1997 version in anamorphic widescreen and I think that looks pretty good. Why did they need to spend all that money on a restoration that just screwed up the video and audio presentation? So they could claim "digitally remastered" on the box?

What the hell? Why does every movie have to be "Digitally restored" or whatever? I mean what if the film already looks pretty good? Do studios think people won't buy something unless they spend money on restoring it anyways?

Most people would have been amazed at the improved quality simply by it being on dvd. After all, not many people have even heard of laserdisc, fewer had the movies on that format so their previous reference would have been the vhs tapes. Seriously, how could a dvd not be light years ahead of fricken vhs?

If I had seen the 2006 original version dvds back in 2004, I would have thought they were amazing. Because I didn't know anything about video technology then and I always had the impression of the Star Wars movies looking very bad on tape. Just seeing a video master without the blurriness added by vhs would have looked stunning to me. But by 2006, I knew what laserdisc was, knew what anamorphic widescreen meant and my family purchased a widescreen television.