La Fea Mas Bella

It's a souvenir, not a substitute.
Wow. Don't buy this unless you've already seen most of series, especially towards the end. That way, your memory can fill in the large gaps left behind by merciless editing. Otherwise, I don't think this DVD set is going to make much sense to you.

When I heard this set was going to be less than 20 hours, I got worried. The actual series was about 300 hours long, minus commercials. Even though that included a lot of filler material I knew I'd never miss, I didn't think there was any way to get it down to 20 hours without losing some important plot points.

Well, maybe there is a way to do it, but this DVD set isn't it. The runtime is 15 hours, 24 minutes, which means (predictably) that there's a lot of stuff missing.

The packaging is very cheesy - inside the box, there's just one small sheet of paper (printed on only one side) that lists the chapter breaks for the main program. If you want to know where the extras are, you need to hunt around the disks...

Sorry Explanation for bad editing
I'm seriously upset with the DVD set, many of the already posted reviews match everything I would say... so I'm only going to post what happened when I emailed the CEO of Xenon Pictures.... This does not make up for anything maybe if more fans emailed Xenon and complained something better might come out of it.

"Hi Cynthia. I'm sorry you were disappointed with the dvd version of La Fea Mas Bella.

As you are aware, the original telecast versions of La Fea and other telenovelas are often up to 300 hours in length. If we were to release an unedited version of any particular show, we'd be asking consumers to pay $150 per telenovela given the fact that it would be a 25-30 disc set. We tested a full length version of Amor Real (the most popular telenovela of its time) and no one wanted it at that price. Another difficult issue is music clearance costs which makes a full length version too expensive to produce.

In terms of what you saw in the final product of...

You won't get the whole story!
This DVD set has already been released in Mexico. Although there are four DVDs you will not get the whole set of episodes that were shown on TV. They are edited and a lot is missing, especially toward the middle and end. The main story is there, but you might have to look up an episode guide on the internet to make sense out of some of the plot. Otherwise there will be some very strange jumps in the story. Other than that, this is a great series with excellent acting and a lot of it is laugh-out-loud funny, so you will probably enjoy it even when the plot seems a little incoherent.

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