Okay, personal reflection and mea culpa time. I never liked the DVD colors (too blue) and also was dubious of the Blu-ray colors (too gold), although I thought they looked good in spite of my doubts about their authenticity. Upon seeing the WOWOW screencaps, I was sold that those represented the real deal.

I'd downloaded custom Blu-ray cover art with the correct movie title, and I'd even edited the "scenes from the film" on the back cover so that they matched the WOWOW colors. Yeah, I was that kinda anal about it, but I love this movie.

I was all set to start a new project where I'd apply HDTV colors to the Blu-ray, splice in the old, darker, opening without the clipped sky detail, and even try to put back the snake reflection from Laserdisc, what the hell.

I browsed those 35mm stills posted elsewhere and thought, "Well, that shows that the gold tint on the Blu-rays was at least partially justified, but look at that sunset, that's still not right. Maybe I can figure out if there's a happy medium." So I spent some time in Photoshop doing some color correcting, and... er, well, now I'm convinced even the sunset is probably much closer to correct on the Blu-rays than on WOWOW. I've done a U-turn and now think the golden hues of the Blu-ray are actually the result of a careful restoration, not a deliberate alteration.

There's still plenty of deliberate alterations on the Blu-ray. The overly-brightened opening, the missing snake refection, and so on. But the colors? Not so much, I'm now convinced. And I'm afraid I just can't justify doing a whole preservation project to undo such fairly inconsequential things. So sorry to all, and thanks in particular to Harmy for providing those 35mm stills. They may have taken a really long time to do it, but they changed at least one mind.