Since the ITV version looks to be an in-house transfer, the film print they received was most likely Academy flat (i.e., the film was unsqueezed and cropped using an optical printer, so the print itself was P&S), but who knows what element it might have been derived from?

If only someone could track down one of those flat 16mm prints that used to appear on eBay, that might answer some of the questions.

Actually, now that I think about it, the presence of the clouds on the ITV print actually makes some sense - remember, it also lacks the Tantive burn marks, which means that the picture might have been derived from the same, or at least a similar, film source as the official video masters of the era. (I wonder if it has some of the same damage, like maybe those dark blobs during the saber training...)

If it was a cropped print, the presence of the mono mix isn't really an enigma, Fox or Lucasfilm or whoever likely just combined the mono soundtrack with the cropped picture element.

One key difference is that, though I believe it has the Episode IV crawl, it has the 1977 flyover, meaning the edit point is right after the crawl instead of at the end of the flyover as it usually is.

Here's what Catnap looks like:

It has the clouds. Not surprising, it shares a lot of printed-in damage and splices with the Puggo Grande print, so both 16mm prints must have been made off the same internegative.

EDIT: Here's Starkiller/MeBeJedi, or at least this is the version I could find on Usenet. I did some hue/saturation correction, but this is the best I could get out of the who-knows-what'th-generation quality:

Well, that's just great. Due to the generation loss and the digital macroblocking (not really visible in this frame), I can't TELL whether or not the clouds are there! My instincts say they aren't, but it's so degraded that the planet just looks like a big blob of color.

Does anybody at least have a copy of this bootleg without the macroblocking, or is this it?