Growing up with the SLV on VHS, this is the one line that made me a fan of the movie over the years. I would buy a restored SLV on Bluray in a heartbeat (maybe combined with some of the DE tweaks). There's a few other little character moments like this that helped give the film heart, even if they don't make it a "masterpiece".
It would be no problem at all to put the theatrical release and the special edition on one blu ray. I just got Alien and Aliens, they did it there.
The matte paintings in the original were pretty horrible. That Vulcan matte looks like it has perspective issues. There's that other painting where they are standing on the saucer section and it's totally wrong.
There's actually a lot of mattes in the Vulcan sequence. Most people see two. I see six: Establishing shot of landscape Establishing shot of Masters at foot of statue Closeup of lead Vulcan Master with painted rocks to screen left Wide 1 shot of Masters by statue foot (with painted tunnel to far right, painted rocks to right of foot, and painted walls to left) Wide shot 2 of Masters by statue foot—similar to 4 but not the same (different angle and closer) Closer angle on the Masters with painted rocks and tunnel The DE fully replaced only 1 & 2, and replaced only the rightmost parts of 3 & 4, leaving other details. The problem with the "wing walk" (as it was called by the production) is pretty obvious when you look at the shot. If you follow the perspective lines of the set piece the saucer would end up looking small. The apparent reason: they built section of hull and the V'ger walkway on a stage and they could only get back from it so far, so it as shot with a wide angle lens which made doing the perspective you'd want basically impossible. This set should have been outdoors and shot at night so they could get far enough back to use the correct lens.
^^^It's been years, so I'd hate to misquote Andy. I'll poke around for any emails about the DE. I do recall he detested the DE's treatment of the officer's lounge, because it's not at all what was intended, and the compromise was to put the room where the outside windows matched shape, which put the room in the same place as the Rec Deck, out of which you can already see the nacelle (as in this screenshot). He also pointed out that the DE V'ger energy bolts over Earth are vastly larger than those in the original shots they appear next to, making them larger than V'ger itself (you can tell because the DE shows them coming over the horizon, so it's clear how big they are).
I love how the DE totally changed the statues in the wide shots, but didn't notice that the feet are suddenly glowing red for no reason in the these two live-action shots. Film Editing 101. Bravo, gentlemen. Now, even when I saw TMP as a little kid in the '90s, I thought the original establishing shot of the statue was utter shit*, but I accepted it because it attempted to match the actual set. *Don't get me wrong, if I were to compete in a painting contest against Yuririch's corpse, I'd get my ass handed to me, but that doesn't excuse the horrific perspective and composition in that matte. Of course, considering TMP's production history, and the specific way in which the perspective is FUBAR'd, I'd bet that Yuririch had planned the matte to correspond with a scene filmed from a much different angle, but it was filmed/changed before he could properly alter the painting to match, and so he (or an assistant) had to majorly fudge to get it done on time. Come to think of it, I think "Deus res" had said that Yuririch's paintings were finished very late due to a variety of issues (read: the status quo during TMP's production).
^^^The foot was somewhat translucent because it was supposed to be made of ruby, something the DE statues miss replicating well. There's some question as to if the Vulcan mattes are even Yuricich's work. He was photographed (below) doing a very different painting, and one that much more closely matched Mike Minor's renderings. [2018 EDIT: the book Return to Tomorrow makes clear that Trumbull decided to change Vulcan because we worried that the design seen here was too Earth-like.]