hairy_hen said:

This kind of thing also goes along with what Mike Verta was saying about the '77 crawl on his sources having a lot of instability, while the version seen on the GOUT (which to me looks pretty damn authentic) weaves differently and much less. It's possible that the GOUT version was recreated with CGI, but given the general lack of effort associated with that release, it seems more likely that it's actually real, because to have recreated it so closely would have required an authentic source to base it on, and simply scanning it and pasting it in would have been much easier.

Yeah, me and none discussed this possible scenario of a crawl re-composite here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/The-GOUT-crawl/post/582538/#TopicPost582538 none sent Mr. Edlund a mail about this but no reply as of yet I think.

EDIT:

hairy_hen said:

My first thought was that these recomposites were done at the same time they made the mono mix, but if the bootleg sources with mono audio have the early versions, then that wouldn't seem to be the case. Perhaps they were done when the film's release was extended in 1978, which would allow ample time for them to have noticed the minor flaws and decided to correct them.

^ My thought as well, and I strongly believe that to be the case as all these early versions are in fact the Dolby Stereo prints. Moth3r's is a fold-down of the stereo and for Grande, Puggo took the mono mix from the Swedish 16mm print, and AntcuFaalb's 'PS77-78?' is a Stereo print as well.

So we might perhaps start to refer to these versions as the Stereo and Mono versions.