Don't forget you have plenty of episodes prior to piece together a nice little prologue too!
That would be nice! The only problem is that the uniform colors would change.
You'll probably have slight hair style changes within your movie too. But none of that will bother me. If you like the prologue idea, you can do a desaturated or close to desaturated effect to differentiate those scenes from the bulk of your movie. Just a suggestion!
Good luck editing around/cropping the on-screen credits of each episode.
Nothing zooming and cropping wont fix. (See signature)
It can be tough on certain episodes. Some of it won't come out without actually removing content. I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm just saying good luck. It can be tough to do without the end result looking bad.
This. Ideally, you'll be lucky and most of those parts can be edited out. Since all we have is the DVD version, and then you have to rip it in order to edit it, and then you have to export it to some sort of compressed file to upload it where it will be compressed once again, the scaling will look really bad. But on top of that, you will already be scaling for widescreen. And then for the scenes with credits, you'll be doing even
more scaling. Yuck. I did a re-edit of the first episode. Initially, I was planning to make a widescreen version. But it was those credits over the beginning scenes that changed my mind. I needed at least a couple of those scenes and it looked like poop when I did all of that scaling. So I reluctantly went with 4:3.
If you're planning to do the opening credits in widescreen, I've done that too. In addition to scaling you'll have to do some clever panning up and down between credits since the credits appear both at the top and bottom of the screen - and you'll have to do it after the credits go off the screen to make it less noticeable. But it will be noticeable regardless. It's sort of the opposite of pan and scan.
The cool part is you get some really nice close-ups of the station that way. Too bad it's scaled up from SD though.
Having said all of that, I'll happily watch it anyway! Have fun!
But yes, I would watch it! I'd love to take a crack at it myself, but these days time is the fire in which I burn. 
