The impression I got from the email from the scholastic guy was that he finds it too costly to actually transfer from the 35 mm film again, and is just going to upconvert SD footage like people did with sections to try and make hd preservations of the OOT.

Since it's animated, it actually could look decent. I have a really good script (by have I mean have, not creator of) for upscaling cartoons to HD that really gives good quality and looks a lot better than simply "blowing up" 480P to 1080P. It partially retraces things automatically, fills in solid colors (removing artifacts) and other things, and just basically makes it look like an hd cartoon that just wasn't insanely detailed. I looked for a screenshot example but I don't have any.