Hope you don't mind, Nerfherder.

Here's what he PM'd me:

I have a capture I did myself of the UK laserdisc (on the Tartan label), using a stand-alone Panasonic DVD-recorder. Unfortunately I should have captured each side of the LD to a seperate disc to max out the quality, but it really doesn't look too bad at all to be honest. Pretty sharp picture and the grain is even visible without causing loads of blocking.

Looking at the screen caps of the US LD in the first few pages of your THX thread it looks like there's quite a bit of edge enhancement & halo-ing, which aren't present on the UK laserdisc.

I'm sure he will pop in and join the discussion himself later.

Very interesting that the same weird editing choices are on that one as well... my head hurts... then these editing choices maybe originated in US for TV or what?