Wait…seriously? There are people who genuinely believe that?
The lack of any newly remastered version of Star Wars for twenty years and three generations of home video formats has led to some odd thinking about the films among the public. Many people have quite simply never seen the films at all – they just watch the Special Editions and hear stories from old people at the nursing home about how much better Star Wars was when they were a kid, like everything else, and they don’t believe it. “No thanks, Grandma, we don’t need to hook up your VCR for this right now, I believe you” (rolls eyes).
Someone here ran into a store clerk who must have misheard that there were a few barely-noticeable moments where the lightsaber effects hadn’t been placed over the props the actors held, so he thought that ALL of the lightsabers just looked like cardboard props for the entire film in 1977, until Lucas came along and finally made them glow twenty years later. When people can’t easily verify if some crazy statement is true or not (aside from people who are already Star Wars fans, who even owns a VCR anymore?), all sorts of strange and fantastically wrong ideas grow and spread. That’s the most insidious part of suppressing these films for an entire generation.
EDIT: Found the link to the clerk story – http://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/592462