Awesome clips! This proves once and for all that the lightsaber was always blue in 1977. There are only a couple shots where the color is faint (nowhere near as many as the home transfers), but even in those, you can still see some light blue in there.

So for the most part, the "white" lightsaber was a consequence of home transfers boosting the gamma, causing the color glow element to get obscured. I will never understand why the 97 SE recompositing made it even worse (forget it Jake, it's the SEs).