Harmy wrote: I was actually thinking that about the Czech thing. STAR WARS got it's first theatrical release here (and other post communist countries) in the early 90s, so the prints had to come from somewhere right?
The fall of communism and hollywood finding a new audience leading to Fox looking to create new prints which would bring to GL's attention that the original was degrading is a logical sequence of events which lead up to the SEs. Now is it Fox who first looked and found unsatisfactory results and went crawling to LFL who then said hey for a few extra bucks let us do some computer enhancements. Probably not as I can't see how they hadn't heard stories of the 77 type of film's shortcomings in this same time period, and GL was just waiting for technology to catch up so everything could be put onto one bill.