zombie84 said:

I can tell you guys something. I know some people in Lucasfilm and some people who worked at The Ranch (or is it the Presidio now? whatever). And every piece of film ever shot for all of the films has been scanned and digitized now. A guy I know walked into one of their editing bays and started talking to this staff editor--he had seen every second of every bit of film for all the films, all the takes, everything, because they have been slowly digitizing this stuff over the last few years. That's why we have all these outtakes on the BDs and stuff.

If that's the case then that would mean that all unaltered scenes for the OT (and PT for that matter, but who really cares about those) are all on a computer hard-drive at Skywalker Ranch, right? Did the man you talked to know if this included the OOT or, just for curiosity's sake, the Holiday Special? I guess "everything" would include the OOT. I've always been skeptical that Lucas would just throw things that he didn't like (holiday special/OUT) in the dumpster, but I didn't know that things were being digitally preserved as well, even if they don't actually clean it up at all. If this is the case for the OUT then maybe that's what Lucas meant when he said that the current releases get "priority" over the classic versions of things. Maybe he meant that the SE's come first, and then when the time comes the classics will be released. I don't know, I might be putting more thought into this than George Lucas put into all of his SE changes combined