jrmilt said:

I thought I remember hearing the laserdiscs for SW and ESB still have aliasing due to noise reduction pass used at the time of authoring? And that the Japanese discs didn't have this? I forget. Anyways, yeah, ask "Laserdisc Master". [job title of the year]

Aliasing is so bad with scope films on LD because said films were usually scanned flat with the same (e.g., flying spot) scanners used for other non-scope films. The choice was made to drop half the scanlines rather than do the 2:1 anamorphic stretch (like with an anamorphic lens) since doing the latter would require LD companies to use a whole different machine specifically for scope films.

Dropping half of the scanlines allowed them to use one machine for all transfers, so it was the cheap and easy route.

The vertical blur on consumer CRTs made this a non-issue for the time.

But still... Yuck!