i551 said:
It's too bad the lpp print isn't available yet. I wonder, how do the known theatrical bootlegs treat those shots? I'm rather skeptical of this simply because we've never noticed it before, as far as I know, anyways. Perhaps it was just on ib prints?
From the bootlegs I've seen, the scene never looked like this in the non-IB Technicolor prints.
This is what it looks like on AntcuFaalb's PS78 bootleg (short for Porn Shop '78, because the VHS tape was bought at a porn shop in 1978). It is almost certainly sourced from a first-run domestic 35mm print, meaning it's Eastmancolor by DeLuxe:
And before you ask, yes, the whole bootleg has this greenish look. Back on page 139, Batesy1970 said that all the original prints he's seen had a similar greenish hue.
This is how the same shot looks in the Moth3r bootleg, also sourced from an American Eastmancolor print. It's his color-corrected version, as the source was a multi-generation dub where the chroma had degraded and the magenta information is oversaturated. That's why it still looks kind of pinkish:
(Anybody wanna post a shot from the raw, non-color-corrected version?)
So I think the IB is an anomaly. Remember, the IB prints are not the ultimate authority - most of the world saw the film as it looked on the standard Eastmancolor prints. And even those may have had variations - the Moth3r bootleg has a shot of Red Leader ("Red Leader, we're right above you!") that has an orange tint, but other bootlegs (Starkiller/MeBeJedi, Catnap, Puggo Grande, PS78) have that shot with normal color.
pittrek said he wants it to look like it did in American movie theaters in 1977 - that would mean how the Eastmancolor prints looked when they had all their color intact.
AntcuFaalb is working on a much higher-quality preservation of his bootleg tape, and even though it's analog NTSC colorspace (which Brits like to call "Never Twice the Same Colour"), it's still an important clue to how the colors originally looked on those prints.
So in closing, I agree with Mike Verta, "bring those two bastards in line" with the color timing of the rest of the scene.