Hmm. I am actually really surprised by the comments that I am reading for this episode so far. For Cindy Morrow's previous two episodes this season, "Sisterhooves Social" and "Family Appreciation Day," I found myself feeling that they were fairly lackluster at best while most of you here really seem to have adored them. Now, with "Read It and Weep," we have a season 2 Cindy Morrow episode that I really really liked, and now most of the comments that I am reading here about it seem to be far more negative than positive. Zeil seems to have enjoyed this episode along with me, but based on what I am reading it looks like both Foxxhoria and Narei are giving it the thumbs down. As I said, I am actually quite surprised by this, because I sincerely thought that I was going to open this forum thread here on Furtopia and find everybody here raving about it!
As much as I found myself enjoying this episode, I do have to admit that it really started out with a whimper instead of with a bang. The show's opening sequence right before the theme song was a *huge* missed opportunity for a visual sight gag of how Rainbow Dash injured herself. Showing Rarity, Pinkie Pie, and Twilight Sparkle just standing there and moving their heads to watch Rainbow Dash, without showing Rainbow Dash herself, was a massive animation cop-out. It is so blatant that it makes me wonder if there was an out-of-universe reason for it, such as the animators ran out of time or money to make a better more involved scene, or if this scene was reworked at the very last-minute due to some kind of executive meddling causing the original animation for this scene to be rejected. This is one of those instances where I have to get up onto my animation soapbox and remind the animators that they are working with a
visual medium here. Because television is a visual medium, you absolutely
must take advantage of the visuals when telling your story as much as possible, or you are just plain wasting the medium's potential. This opening scene barely utilized the visual nature of television at all-- if you don't believe me, perform this little test: listen to this opening sequence with your eyes closed.
You lose almost nothing. All of the information that you need to understand this scene is presented in the audio track, as if it was a radio play. You hear Rainbow Dash zooming around, so you know that she is performing tricks, or at the very least flying extremely fast. You know that the characters are watching Rainbow Dash, because Pinkie Pie actually says that they are out loud. You know that Rainbow Dash does something particularly dangerous and then crashes because you hear the crash and then you hear the watching ponies go, "Oooo!" The only little thing that you miss by keeping your eyes closed during the entire scene is the very small sight-gag where Pinkie Pie twists her neck around and then needs to comically unwind it, but that doesn't present any information needed to understand the scene. With television and movies, you should never establish important things with dialog that can be more effectively shown-- for example, in
STAR WARS Episode IV: A New Hope, you never need to be told through any sort of complex lengthy dialog that the Rebels are totally outclassed and in a desperate struggle against the Galactic Empire. Instead, you are
shown it through the visuals of the opening shot when the absolutely massive Imperial ship overruns the minuscule Rebel ship.
That is how a visual medium is effectively used-- you learn all you need to know about the two sides from the visuals alone. I swear, the professional animators who wrote all of the animation instruction books that I have ever read over the years would all cringe if they saw this waste of a good 40-seconds, and the 40-seconds that are the
inciting incident of the story no less.
If I was the pre-production storyboard artist for this show (boy, wouldn't that be a cool job!), I would have opened this scene in a fashion that is similar to Rainbow Dash's early aerial practice run that you see at the 1:16 mark in the season 1 episode 16, "
Sonic Rainboom." You know, actually *show* Rainbow Dash performing some amazing tricks at high speed followed up by her getting injured in some kind of cartoony comedic fashion. You could show her performing high speed outside loops, whifferdill turns, and other aerobatic maneuvers, and then after being successful she can start hotdogging and waving to her friends below, all while no longer really paying attention to where she is going... and then unexpectedly
smack! She runs into the side of the tower of town hall, or a billboard sign, or a random large bird, or my personal favorite, into an oblivious and hapless Derpy who was just innocently doing her job and trying to fly a letter to deliver to somewhere! If done well this kind of visual gag can be extremely funny, just like when
Wile E. Coyote suddenly slammed into the side of a canyon while flying with his batsuit. More importantly, it fully takes full advantage of the visual medium that is television.
I also liked that you could tell that Dash was truly putting herself into the book. Daring Do had RD's tail/mane, but in grayscale, and their eyes were the same.
While there is absolutely no denying that the character design of Daring-Do is a recolored Rainbow Dash, there is an in-universe reason why she cannot be an example of Rainbow Dash visualizing herself as the book character like you suggest. To quote the MLP:FiM Wiki:
While it may look like that, as the visual imagery is imagined by Rainbow Dash, Daring-Do's similar mane may have been Dash imagining herself as the heroine, the cover of the book clearly shows Daring-Do as having that exact mane.
In other words, I doubt that Rainbow Dash was using her imagination to make herself look like the depiction of Daring-Do on the cover of all of the copies of the book as well.
Speaking of Daring-Do, I absolutely loved this character! As I know that I have mentioned in past posts in this thread, I am an absolute sucker when it comes to brash tomboy characters, which is why ponies such as Spitfire and Rainbow Dash constantly top my HJIPSI* charts! Daring-Do is this and more-- I love her design, I love her speaking voice (which
according to Wikipedia was provided by voice actress Chiara Zanni), I love her costume, heck, I love
everything about her! She can enter my forbidden temple and grab my idol any time!
While I am probably still feeling the overwhelming effects of seeing her for the first time, she may even edge out Spitfire as the pony that I'm personally the most smitten for! I guess that I will have to see how I feel a couple weeks from now once Daring-Do's novelty has had a chance to wear off!
So, much like what Ziel was saying, it was the Daring-Do action sequences that really carried this episode for me-- I loved how colorful they were, I loved how over the top that they were, and I love how well-done that they were. They managed to spoof, and sometimes subvert both
Raiders of the Lost Ark and
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade without feeling too worn out or boring. In other words, they were just original enough to keep things entertaining and exciting!
Here are some random observations thrown in:
- 0:48 - Well, for now our beloved Derpy Hooves is still being shown in the train during the opening title sequence at least.
- 1:42 - This is the second time this season that Rainbow Dash has had a plot "turning point" of some kind in an episode due to her getting a wing injured. I really hope that this event doesn't start to turn into Rainbow Dash's "kryptonite," where whenever the writers need to have a plot point that causes Rainbow Dash to have to face some adversity they take away her defining skill and break her wings. I can see it getting old.
- 2:14 - The appearance of Rainbow Dash's roommate brought back some personal memories for me, boy. I was once in the hospital for some very serious neurosurgery because I had damaged my spinal cord, and my roommate looked very much like Rainbow Dash's-- he had somehow driven off the interstate highway, crashed his car into a giant propane tank which exploded, and he was thrown threw the air and landed in a scorched crumpled heap on the other side of a barn. He had burns and broken bones throughout his body, and looked just like that poor pony. Yeesh. Speaking of Rainbow Dash's roommate, I thought that he/she could have had some real impact on this story, but I will get into that more later.
- 2:44 - It's probably just me being overly sensitive to this particular sound effect since I don't particularly like it, but it seems like they used that "squeaky toy" sound effect a lot in this episode. It's really starting to bug me. I hope that its sudden frequent use isn't the start of a trend.
- 2:53 - Rainbow Dash: "Reading's for egg-heads like you, Twilight." *Looks around at the stacks of hundreds of computer programming books in my basement* That really hurts my feelings, Rainbow Dash!
- 3:03 - Pffft! You're one to talk, Applejack! I don't believe you for a second! With the way you view the world I doubt that you have ever read more than the occasional few pages out of a Farmer's Almanac over your entire lifetime! Hmph!
- 5:39 - Hey! A cheetah! With cheetahs being my favorite animal and all, I have to admit that I was really curious as to how they would have been drawn in the MLP:FiM style. Now I know!
- 6:05 - I love Daring-Do's little salute right here! We also get to see Rainbow Dash do it as a homage to Daring-Do later on in the episode at 18:00!
- 6:39 - Rainbow Dash has "bedroom eyes" right here. You know, when Rainbow Dash gazes at you like this, she starts to not look half bad... I'm just sayin'!
- 7:18 - That was a wicked flip that Daring-Do just performed right there!
- 8:24 - Considering the fact that Hasbro also owns the rights to the board game Battleship in addition to MLP:FiM, I have to wonder if they might actually release a special version of it based on the parody game of it that Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, and Twilight Sparkle played at this point in the show.
- 12:06 - As much as I absolutely love Daring-Do's design, I absolutely hate the design of Ahuitzotl. What I initially thought were his nostrils turned out to actually be his eyes. I am sorry, but where his eyes are placed just does not look right at all. He is visually very disturbing to me to the point where I don't even want to look at him. Why couldn't they have placed his eyes further back on his skull kind of like where the eyes are placed on a canine? He looks absolutely freaky with his eyes way up front on the end of his snout like that!
- 12:23 - Applejack: "You're looking sweatier than a pig wrangler on a summer's day!" Ug. That line is just abrasive to me. And hasn't it already been established that other hoofed animals in Equestria (like cows and sheep) can all talk too? That makes it sound even more wrong that AJ is talking about wranglin' pigs. I swear, it's awkward moments like this that make me start to wonder what kinds of rights that the hoofed-animals other than ponies even have in Equestria.
- 13:18 - The leopard and the tiger are carrying a mace and a spiked-club to beat Daring-Do with! LOL!
- 14:25 - I would love to go into a fanboi-mode type tirade right here about how absurd it is to have a modern day Electrocardiography machine beeping away in the same room as a lantern being powered by fireflies is being used, but I have long since given up any hope of ever making any kind of sense out of the ponies' apparent varying levels of technology.
- 14:53 - I was so waiting to hear the pony doctor explain that they were kicking Rainbow Dash out of the hospital at this point because they just found out that she doesn't have any medical insurance! That would make Ponyville's quality of medical care so much more like the real world's!
- 14:56 - Rainbow Dash: "How will I ever find out what happened to Daring-Do!" This is Rainbow Dash's "idiot ball" moment for this episode. I doubt that the medical staff would have given a damn about whether or not Rainbow Dash enjoys reading, and with how happy and trusting pony society seems to be they probably wouldn't have had any problem with Rainbow Dash borrowing their Daring-Do book until she had finished reading the last chapter. But no, Rainbow Dash doesn't even consider this reasonable solution-- instead she dons a cat-burglar outfit and breaks into the hospital. And while I'm on the subject, it probably would have been better visually if they had Rainbow Dash dress up as Daring-Do for her hospital break-in instead of a burglar. Then they could have made her breaking into the hospital visually allude to Daring-Do's earlier break-in into the forbidden temple much more effectively, and Rainbow Dash's salute while swinging from a vine at 18:00 make even more sense.
- 16:00 - As I previously said, Rainbow Dash must not have insurance!
- 16:50 - There's that darn "squeaky toy" sound effect again! Grrrrr!
- 17:50 - This was brought up in another brony forum that I happened to read, but the house where Pinkie Pie was shown sleeping in this episode was *not* Sugarcube Corner. Up until now it was established that Pinkie Pie lived up on the Sugarcube Corner building's second floor!
- 19:50 - Rainbow Dash: "Yeah, I get it. I shouldn't knock something until I've tried it!" That's the setup for a Twi-Dash shipping fiction if I ever heard one!
I swear the barking pony looked like Trixie to me.
The barking pony at 18:23 was an Earth pony, not a unicorn, and had a screw as a cutie mark.
I thought of two possible story lines here. The first being what actually happened. The second being that we would learn that RD actually didn't know how to read, and was trying to hide it from her friends. Frankly, I'm glad the episode went the direction that it did.
As I alluded to above, I thought that Rainbow Dash's hospital roommate could have potentially been given a greater role in the story. As you know, the roommate was in the hospital room the entire time that Rainbow Dash was reading the Daring-Do book out loud, and knew Rainbow Dash's secret that she had started to enjoy reading. I think that it would have been an interesting twist of the roommate had healed and gotten his/her bandages taken off, turned out to be someone Rainbow Dash knew (but maybe didn't like), and threatened Rainbow Dash that he/she would tell Rainbow Dash's friends that Rainbow Dash had become an egghead that enjoyed reading. Then Rainbow Dash could have spent the tail-end of the episode being put in more and more outlandish situations throughout town trying to stop the roommate from talking. I am not saying that this alternative direction that the episode's plot could have taken is better than what they did by any means (because overall I really liked what they did in this episode)-- instead, I am just saying that this was another way that things could have gone.
Anyway, as I said above I had a
lot of fun with this episode, and I liked the world of Daring-Do that I was exposed to so much that I think that she may have actually inspired another future project for me to do that I can add to my ever-expanding project database! Apparently I was not the only one inspired by Daring-Do either-- while I haven't read any of these personally, I saw in one of my Google searches earlier this morning that there already was
two Daring-Do MLP:FiM fan-fictions that were in the works:
Daring-Do and the Ruby Knight, and
Daring-Do and the Crimson Catalyst. That is absolutely crazy, since it hasn't even been 48-hours yet since the episode "Read It and Weep" first aired! Hopefully I can get my own project idea done before some other brony thinks of it and gets it done first-- in a fandom of this size that is this active, pretty much anything that you can think of has been already thought up and done by some other brony-- it's pretty insane!
For next week it looks like we have a St. Valentine's Day-themed episode called "Hearts and Hooves Day," where amazingly the actual MLP:FiM writers themselves are finally presenting us with an
official shipping fiction-- according to the episode's program guide description, those little rascals the Cutie Mark Crusaders are going to be slipping both Big McIntosh and Cheerilee a love potion with the hopes of hooking them up, which ends up having some unexpected consequences. While generally my Valentine's Day-themed cartoon watching doesn't get much further than the television special,
Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown (Charlie Brown, I feel your pain, brother!), I think that I will make an exception in this case because of how much I absolutely adore Cheerilee. Hmmm, it looks like I will have to try to live through the character of Big McIntosh for this upcoming episode! Yeah!
* HJIPSI - "Hoagiebot-Jones Industrial Pony Stock Index"
