Loved, loved, loved Balance! THIS has made Phantom Menace not only WATCHABLE for me, but also improved the story and characters 100%. It's amazing what a little trimming can do to bolster otherwise tedious and flat performances by Anakin, Shmi and even Padme in places. No more cringe-worthy moments. When Anakin leaves his mother, it's much more powerful now with all the superfluous dialouge excised. Podrace is VASTLY improved by the addition of music borrowed from Shadows of the Empire and A New Hope. The inclusion of deleted scenes like Greedo, Morning of the Race and the waterfall scene - all of them were fantastic. The deleted underwater sequence was warranted. Little things, like Watto humming the Cantina song, Jar-Jar and Boss Nass' new dialogue, the Imperial March for Darth Maul were all great touches.
Drawbacks: The only major drawback is the picture quality, if this were DVD quality, my copy of TPM would be traded-in immediately. Other stuff is just nitpicky - There were a few transitions that could be smoothed out a little, but it could have just been the slightly jumpy transfer. The shot of Jar-Jar swimming (waterfall sequence) could have been cut out. And his dive into the water (Ootah Gunga), for that matter. I wasn't a big fan of shadowing Sidious' face. I thought his performance was one of the few to be treasured from this film, and fading out his facial features was unnecessary I thought. But, just my opinion. I did think the new languages were as annoying as a lot of others had said. There were two or three places where the Neimoidian dialogue was distracting, but overall I found to be very inventive and effective. Besides, I'll take these few minor shortcomings over George Lucas' sweeping and grating oversights any day.
Clone War was a different story. I thought magnoliafan let much more slip under the radar than he did with Phantom. The performances of the actors in the first few scenes are downright horrible. Much of it begged to be cut. I didn't like the Dooku as "father of the Rebellion" suggestion. I like the idea of Dooku being a Sith and the Seperatist movement as just another one of Palpatine's manipulations to sweep himself into power. But, that's just my personal preference. The inclusion of the deleted scenes felt out of place to me in this version - with the exception of the Mace/Obi-Wan scene, which I felt was worlds better than the "Floating Yoda" film cut, and conveyed more of Obi-Wan's reservations about Anakin.
Overall though, Clone War needed more (or less). Something about it was just lacking. Even down to Dooku's yellow saber, this one just did not work for me. But all in all, it was satisfying to see another take on it.
Thanks again, Bwlag! And big thanks to MagnoliaFan for having the balls to do it and put it out there for us! Mucho respect to you. I do hope someone talks about remastering Balance in a higher quality, higher-def version.