This one’s very simple and quick to do, and I may not even do it at all. I still have very concrete plans for this project, but they rest on my being able to procure the 2003 series on Blu-Ray for a price that isn’t absurd, which might take a while.
To summarize, there are two Fullmetal Alchemist anime series - the first, which is loosely based on the manga for the first 20 episodes or so (the remaining 30 have nothing whatsoever to do with the manga), and the new one (Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood in America), which is based much more strictly on the manga.
I’ve seen the original anime, read the manga (up to the current issue, 99 - it’s supposed to be coming to an end very soon), and seen Brotherhood to its current episode (23). Brotherhood is, in my opinion, far superior to the original anime, simply because it adapts the manga much, much more closely.
But it isn’t perfect. The first episode is an “intro” episode that has nothing to do with anything. The second episode is a flashback episode detailing the Elric brothers’ histories. The third episode opens in Lior, which is the beginning of the first series and the manga. There are also two events from the manga that were not adapted for Brotherhood - the thing with First Lieutenant Yoki in the mining town (which I think may be “flashback”-ed in a later episode, as Yoki becomes important later on in the manga), and the thing with the hostages on the train, both of which were adapted (quite faithfully) in the first anime series.
So the plan is simple - restructure the opening of Brotherhood to match the manga (a short “teaser” of Ed’s missing leg bleeding after the failed attempt to transmute his mother, followed by the intro credits, then the Lior episode), and repurpose the two episodes from the original anime to become episodes of this series. (The problem here is that the original is not in widescreen, while Brotherhood is, and that Brotherhood uses a different voice for Colonel Mustang and some other characters, but I don’t think they’re insurmountable problems.) The flashback scenes will be moved from their spot in episode 2 and placed where they were in the manga (mostly after they meet up with Izumi around episode 10 or 11).
Now, the reason I bring any of this up is simply to gauge interest in such a project. It would be SD widescreen, in Japanese with English subtitles (burned in), and I would likely only provide the affected episodes in 480p MKV or AVI format. This may require whoever downloads them to re-number the remaining episodes, but since I’m removing two episodes and adding two more, it may not be an issue.
So, how about it? Anyone care?