Jorel81 said:

It was Star Wars on the big screen! And Boba Fett was in it! And people were getting rowdy and everyone was really enjoying it and it was just an amazing thing. It was beautiful to be in a dark theater with hundreds of other Star Wars nerds watching the movie and cheering and all that stuff. HOWEVER...nobody told us at that point...or at least I didn't know, that the original negatives had been butchered for it. And I didn't realize, that the plan was to change the movies forever.

I think many of us had the same experience. I saw absolutely nothing wrong with adding to them for a special anniversary release. And it was fun having "new" footage of Harrison as Solo on the big screen, even with a weird looking Jaba. Greedo shooting first? It's probably sacrilege, but I'm not sure that I noticed the first time.

It wasn't until years later during the build up to the DVD releases, and the retirement of VHS collections, etc, that it dawned on me that the originals were being buried alive. Surely the anniversary cut from 97 should be material for "disc 2" in a DVD release? And that's how I found this place, the first time. Everyone at the time was excited about a silly soon-to-be-vaporware fancypants laserdisc encoding. Look how far it's all come...