suntech said:

I noticed an occasional little stutter (the best way I can describe it is like this. If the scene shows some one walking it looks like they are playing it frame by frame at a high speed almost to be undetectable as the scene goes one frame at a time.) I have seen this before on low budget stations like they have a computer that doesn't have a fast enough hard drive and a older cpu so the system can not keep up with the program. does that make sense?

Yes, but we've already established that the stutter was most likely an artifact of the movie being time-compressed. You, SilverWook and I all saw it.

As to ABC - knowing it ran in a 3-hour slot, I am willing to believe it wasn't time compressed. But does the other copy also have blending?

I do know (in particular from my L.A. friend, who is 7 years older than me) that the TV networks' telecine equipment (ABC's in particular) were behind the curve for much of the 80s - I don't know whether it was still film-chain or if it was flying-spot, but whatever it was, it still had a tendency to pick up an "after-image" of the last frame of film, hence the blending.

Anything that was transferred to video by the network, as opposed to being received on tape from the studios, would have this problem. Even when studios started sending some movies out on tape (e.g., Star Wars), there were still movies, especially TV versions with extended scenes and/or alternate "TV-friendly" takes, being transferred from film at the network into the mid/late 80s. (Even as late as 1987, the TV edit of Ghostbusters as broadcast on ABC looked decidedly more "smeary" than the official home video transfer.)

TWOK premiered on ABC in 1985, so it would have still been in this era.