I don’t even know what BlueRay is. 
Exactly. This *will *happen. A new 4K “restoration” has been done on the original trilogy–this is a fact. There really is no motivation to go to that effort on the altered versions of the films.
Kathleen Kennedy (who runs Lucasfilm under Disney) has been consistent in her approach in fostering the goodwill that has been eroded with older casual fans over the last 17 years. Episode VII seems to be a “reboot” insofar as it will be accessible to those people who loved the old movies but hated the prequels, and one of the best ways to reignite an interest in the next movie would be to release a pre-Special Edition restored original trilogy in HD. Disney and Fox will have worked something out because they’d both be mad not to.
All I know is that I have the original trilogy on DVD, and it is the original cut - doesn’t even say “Episode IV - A New Hope” on the preshow crawl. 
It’s the High Definition version of DVD. It’s called BluRay because it uses a blue laser, which is what allows it to read more information on the same sized disc.
So do I, but it isn’t cleaned up and isn’t even anamorphic.
Steaming is field of pretty flowers that smell
[buffering]
bad.
How have these movies been “altered” so that the unaltered versions have such appeal?
I think it’s funny that, even with the OP spelling it correctly, people still have trouble with the spelling of Blu-ray. What an odd choice of spelling.
There’s lots of info out there if you want to do a frame-by-frame or really nitpicky search on it, but the basic gist is that Lucas was really enormously hampered by the lack of special effects technology when the original trilogy was being made.
(So much so, that’s where Industrial Light and Magic (the SFX company) came from - he needed effects, no one could do them, so he hired people and created the effects from scratch.)
However, even with doing his own stuff, using lots of miniatures and bigatures and maquettes and wire-work, the “final” visual impact was not what he had envisioned. He was never actually happy with Star Wars the way it was.
(That’s a large part of why he went back and created the Prequel Trilogy - the effects were available for him to make what he wanted to (and we all see where that led) and so he used effects with abandon because that’s what he liked, and what he had wanted to do originally.)
So, he wasn’t happy with Star Wars, he wanted to make it match his “vision” better, so when the tech became available, he started adding back in all the stuff that he was forced to cut or work around before.
Lucas thinks that scenes like having Jabba actually appear in Star Wars (instead of being a vague undefined threat until Empire), or adding in obviously CGI “alien” creatures to the streets in various places makes the films better - many of the fans (and several professionals) disagree, claiming that the tech limitations made him (and the show-runners) much more creative and inventive, and to tell better stories within the confines of what was possible.
This is very much a YMMV situation, except a lot of people have significant childhood or formative geeky identity wrapped up in this particular intellectual property, making it a big deal to lots of people.
Besides the purely technical, he changed the story itself in some ways. The biggest, stupidest one being the “Han shot first” scene. In the original, Han is held at gunpoint by Greedo, sneakily gets his blaster out, and blows Greedo to kingdom come before he gets dragged to Jabba. In the “improved” version, Han sneakily gets his blaster out and waits for Greedo to shoot him first, at point blank range. “Luckily” Greedo missed, and Han got to return fire.
You go from a tight, tense scene establishing Han as a bad ass, to a scene with plot holes you can drive a truck through, establishing Han as a dipshit, and Greedo as a half blind bounty hunter.
This is given as the reason Jaws turned out so great; the fake shark proved so difficult that they had to show it sparingly, thus increasing the excitement, suspense, etc.
I think the prequels were all abortions that should be forgotten.
The alien song and dance scene added to Jedi is 100x worse the the Han Shot First change.
You make it sound so…clinical.
Close the blast doors! Close the blast doors!
Other than the “Han shot first” thing I don’t really see how the updated versions detract at all from the series. In most respects (like the entry to Mos Eisley) I like them much better.
I recently rewatched the original series (on the updated DVDs) for the first time since the late 90s. For one thing, the new CGI is really fake looking. Every time I noticed a really herky-jerky walking animal, I knew it was a later addition. Then there’s the celebration scenes on Coruscant and Naboo. They stick out like sore thumbs and look like they belong in a different movie, which, of course, they do.
I was kind of okay with Coruscant because they at least mention it in the original series. But yeah, the inclusion of Naboo was fucking weird.
I believe the biggest reason that people get possessive of the unaltered version is Lucas’ attitude that the original unaltered versions “never existed”. I swear he used to deny that he even made any changes at all.
Before the DVDs came out, for example, people tried to tell me the original Star Wars has always had “A New Hope” under the title. All they knew was the altered versions. So I get possessive of the way it was when I saw it the first time.
Most movies are released on DVD the same as they were in the theater. No one has to worry about an “improved”* Alien*. or the Terminator DVD saying “Episode 1” in the credits. The movies that are altered are “special editions”, and marketed as such. No one tried to argue that the Director’s Cut of Blade Runner was the only edition that ever existed. You can buy either version.
But Lucas did that with Star Wars, and even worse, basically says that the fans that prefer it the original way are wrong. Not simply having different tastes, but wrong. It’s easy to get mad at that attitude, and by extension, get defensive of the original version.
Well, it works if you watch the series Machete Style
The original did always have “A New Hope” under the title. I distinctly remember seeing “Episode IV: A New Hope” the first time I saw it in the 80s and asking my brother if there were three I was supposed to watch first.
Or are we talking about the packaging?
ARRRRGGGGH!
Just kidding…
In 1977 the movie crawl just said “Star Wars”. The subtitle “Episode IV: A New Hope” was added in the 1980 theatrical rerelease, in conjunction with the release of “Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back”, which had the full title and subtitle in the crawl from the beginning. Lucas’ first of many changes to the film, to make SW match the second and all following movies.
He also removed the “close the blast doors” line, and IIRC changed a bunch of scene transitions from wipes to cuts (or vice-versa). Making Greedo shoot first, adding CGI Jabba, etc, came later in the 90s.
The matte boxes seen around the fighters weren’t in the theatrical version, but are I believe an artifact of the transition to VHS.