I should probably chime in at this point...
First of all, one name that hasn't been brought up during this discussion is that of David Tomblin, first assistant director on ROTJ and director of Return Of The Ewok (ROTE). He is key to this whole discussion, since ROTE was his film and his baby. He was given unprecendented access to every aspect of ROTJ to make his own little film, which the actors and crew happily cooperated with him on. Lucas (and everyone else involved) must have really liked him. Unfortunately, he never fully completed the film...but he did give a VHS copy of the rough cut to Warwick Davis early on. Warwick forgot about it for a long time, but eventually brought it out for Celebration I in 1999 (and I think another event just prior)...and that was its first exposure to the world. Needless to say, it was wildly popular among those lucky enough to be there to see it (myself included), and it became Warwick's centerpiece for many of his appearances to come.
Lucasfilm apparently did not have a copy of this film at all (the only physical copy of the cut was probably in Tomblin's hands), and they requested to borrow the VHS from Warwick to make a digital preservation copy, probably around the time of Celebration I. That digital copy would have formed the basis for the edited Hyperspace version, and I'm certain that the unedited version resides in the LFL archives for posterity...though we will probably never see it in its entirety due to the clearance nightmares involved in releasing it to the public.
Sadly, David Tomblin died in 2005 leaving ROTE in limbo with the original film stock still missing. I had hoped that the actual film might turn up in his estate after his death, but so far I've heard nothing to indicate that. It was probably lost long ago, possibly destroyed, leaving Warwick's VHS tape the only known copy in existence.
A lot of these questions came up while ocpmovie/Garrett and I were researching the preservation of this film, and while Garrett was editing the complete film together from the best/only sources out there. He made the discovery then that both the "Wicket & Fett" clip from the 2004 DVD and the "Warwick waving goodbye" from the documentary were alternate takes from what was on the original ROTE film. Since preservation of the original version was more important to us than the better quality, we opted to not use the alternate takes; and instead, Garrett put them in the DVD menu loop...which I think worked well.
What this means is that there are at least a couple of scraps of original footage Tomblin shot that got left with Lucasfilm. Whether there are more scraps or not is anyone's guess, but the entire film itself has not shown up. If it did, I'm fairly sure Lucasfilm would do an article about the discovery, even if they couldn't show the film to the public.
The fan preservation of ROTE, which edited all the footage from Hyperspace together with the only other footage available (a dodgy cam recording of a VHS presentation), is the only way to view the entire film outside of managing to catch Warwick while he's presenting it. Garrett even mixed Supertramp's "Take The Long Way Home" back into the Hyperspace footage, in the proper place. We made a decision to use proper widescreen clips from the trilogy to replace the "scrunched" temp footage that Tomblin had left in, and Garrett added in title and credits to the film - the only two things that really deviated from the rough cut's original presentation.
It's not outside the realm of possibility to think that an original celluloid print of ROTE could still turn up somewhere. It could be lost in the Lucasfilm archives, still lost in Tomblin's estate somewhere, or lost somewhere else entirely. Hey, look at what happened to Metropolis...the original version showed up 80 YEARS after all copies were supposedly destroyed! Of course, ROTE is nowhere near that level of sacred, even though we'd like to think it is. ;)
--SKot
