Should I look at the Laserdisc and see if this artifact is there? Keep in mind this is a non-anamorphic widescreen image being blown up and viewed on hig resolution monitors that didn't exist when the disc was made...

One low tech idea I had for degrading the DVD video to match the LD would be to record the analog 4:3 output of a DVD player to my Super VHS deck, (Which is close to Laserdisc in resolution) and then capture that back to DVD. This would require a player that defeats macrovision, or the aforementioned gizmo I was thinking of buying to work though!