Absolutely. First of all, that sounds like Frank Bonner, so it must have been edited during the show's production. No one would have paid to bring him in to dub one word for the syndicated versions.
Even if that wasn't Bonner, the edit has to be from the mid 1980s, if not earlier. The...
It doesn't, in my experience. I had two reviews of MST3K sets from Shout! that were temporarily deleted because MSTies flagged them. They said I shouldn't talk about tech aspects of a DVD release at all, because I'll upset Shout! and they'll stop offering the sets, as though Shout! is a company...
I'm going off memories of what someone said on a Usenet group in the 1990s, but wasn't the word "homo" changed to "gay" before the episode ever aired? I am pretty sure it was dubbed as "gay" in the 1980s when I saw the show in reruns, and definitely by 1991 because that's the date of my old VHS...
It looks like "Jennifer's Date" on 1/22/79 was at 9:30PM, which was the originally scheduled broadcast date for "The Contest." It was postponed a week, though, and "The Contest" aired 1/29/79 at 8:30PM. Is it possible that they had to quickly cut down to a 24-minute version (perhaps an extra 60...