The SLV being a film print has some credence, as there have been stories that a different cut of the film screened on airlines. I think Stephen Collins mentions in the book RETURN TO TOMORROW hearing from a stranger on the street that a different cut with the 'we all create god in our own image' line was playing at a 2nd run house in NY.
I don't want to get into the thing about film elements again, because MM has stormed in a couple times in the last decade or two saying that they had all the assets for the DVD work, whereas I still think the stories I heard had credence, that Trumbull and Dykstra eventually tossed their original elements a couple years into the 80s when Paramount refused to claim them.
That almost nothing from TMP has been repurposed -- except for some part of the vger transcendence that got used in TIN MAN and the simple copies of TMP footage in TWOK, which look severely degraded like dupes, not like recomposites -- seems crazy, given the wealth and quality of material.
Shoot, Shatner could have just skip-printed the vger cloud and pulled a color layer out of it and had a fine center-of-the-galaxy for TFF for no money if the elements were still around, and Ralph Winter would certainly have known that and been lobbying for reasonable cost-cutting, especially given how the money got wasted in large part being thrown at Ferren when their post schedule was massively truncated by the mandated release date.
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