A friend of mine who owns some of the episodes in question on a Columbia House VHS set tells me the season 3 episodes are not cut. However, who knows why they didnt change the opening credits back to the way they were on the episodes. The VHS versions had the correct credits. I can live with shorter credits on a few episodes as long as the story is intact.
Those episodes with the season 6 opening look to be from 16mm prints of the episodes. They jump in certain spots like the film was broken and spliced together. The entire look of those episodes is very noticable when compaired to the rest of the set. I think perhaps the tape masters for those episodes might have been lost. Or, Columbia House never returned them to Universal. This isn't the first time that Columbia House VHS tapes have had complete uncut episodes of shows and when those same episodes come up on DVD, they are either lower quality or they are syndicated cuts of the episodes.
I was wondering why the quality seemed to be significantly worse on those particular episodes. Faded colors, jumps, & lots of debris. Hopefully, this wasn't just shoddy work on the part of Universal. Of course, lost prints equate to shoddy work also.
Either way, I'm still having a blast watching these. I just wish that they had been better taken care of.