Thank you to those who replied. I’ve been doing more research according to your advise.

Here is the real misunderstanding and an urging toward the light for the truth seekers.

<quote>
Yeah, I can certainly understand that this may seem “ridiculous” to most people but I personally find it quite fascinating. It’s about ILM’ers still working on the film when prints were already being struck in order to improve on what first came out of the optical printer.

These visual effects artists didn’t have the luxury seeing how the shot came out until it was done, they basically had to hope for the best. If there happened to be a mistake in the compositing then they had to live with it or just start from scratch.
</quote>

This quote shows that although I considered myself quite knowledgeable on the subject, there untold numbers of prints with variations going out to the theaters. There was not a definitive version. This next quote was about a couple of colored marks on a section of the film.

<quote>
That would mean that there were at least three interpositives/print masters/whatever assembled in 1977. Based on my theories, they’d be:

A “pre-release” one with no orange marks, original composites, and splices (between each negative “roll?”) have copious amounts of cement residue
An “opening-day” one with the orange marks (how were they introduced? were they dark orange damage on the positive, or light blue damage on the negative?), different splices, still the original composites
A “revised” one with the orange marks, same splices as #2, and new composites
</quote>

New seekers of the truth should be aware that there are probably thousands of conversations like this over little marks on the film and literally as many versions of the film to match. While keeping this in mind Seekers, also be mindful that for all the truths, there are an equal number of myths and misconceptions.

One thing I heard/read was that long ago George Lukas donated a 70mm print to the Smithsonian and a scan of it can be seen there. I hope this is true as I’d like to make the pilgrimage to honor this rare artifact (if it really exists).

And to conclude this, My Memory = 0; Despecialized = 1. I concede to the despecialized edition because it is HIGHLY unlikely that I am correct. Of course, a tiny sliver of hope remains. After all one of those thousands of versions may have been the droid… I mean FILM I was looking for.