ShaneLSD said:

excuse my ignorance but i just put the original b&w 16mm scans together and from buck rogers to the end credits its 86min my LD is 85min the so called WB cut was cut by 5mins even with differences people have mentioned its nowhere near 5 mins so it is my belief that this is not the WB cut that george lucas said is 5min shorter it simply is not 5 min shorter. can someone correct me please? i dont understand.

My gut feel is that the 5 minutes supposedly cut, were not necessarily cut from the running time as such, perhaps it was roughly 5 minutes of changes, or just a sloppy metaphor for "they changed my film a bunch and I am crabby about it".

The 16mm version and the Tech IB appear to be identical, both also have the Buck Rogers sequence, which is mentioned in the reviews of the day, so it would appear that the 16mm is the release version that hit cinemas in 1971.

The version Lucas put out post Star Wars is significantly different in the details, so in all likelihood I think we are now, finally, seeing the version that was released in 1971, and like many pieces of history, what has been reported and re-reported, without hard evidence, may in fact end up being more myth than fact.