Review: Double Rainboom

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What? You were expecting me to make a "Double Rainbow" joke? Well, you know what? No. I'm better than that.

Writer/Director: FlamingoRich

Double Rainboom is a Senior film written, directed, & produced by FlamingoRich (Zachary Rich) for his college curriculum – and it is the first-ever fan-made episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Through the combined efforts of bronies across the internet and other students from the Savannah College of Art & Design – the episode features a full orchestral score, studio-quality sound effects, voice actresses for the ponies, and 100% show-accurate animation.

What does it mean*? Click on through the jump to find out!

*Okay, so maybe I'm NOT better than that. Shut up. Beat your face.

Double Rainboom

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You know what I love about this fandom, more than anything else? The creativity. Seriously, this silly little show about pastel-colored talking horses has inspired so many people, myself included, to create art, music, fiction, video games! Something about this show for little girls has attracted creative minds from all over the world, and made us want to pay homage to this land of peace and harmony that is occasionally threatened with total annihilation.

The latest, and some would say the most grand, example of that creative pool is Double Rainboom. Now, unless you've been living under a rock for the past year—which would not be surprising if you ascribe to the Fox News image of bronies—you know all the important details, so I'm not gonna bore you with them. Now, it's here! Possibly the most massive undertaking in the brony fandom is finally on display, ready for all our eager eyes! And what is the result of those countless hours of work, sweat, tears, and effort?

...Meh.

STORY: We open with Twilight doing a bit of a mad scientist shtick down in the basement of the library. You know how it goes: mixing potions, switching liquids from one vial to another, squinting hard, tongue sticking out, industry, science and technology! We here at Sparkle labs are on the forefront of techno—ahem. Sorry.

So, Twi makes a potion that apparently enhances ponies natural talent. I will give credit to the writer; this does feel like something you would see on the show. It's just a vague, nebulous macguffin to drive the plot along. Upon learning that drinking the potion might make her fly insanely fast, Rainbow Dash, being the complete idiot who is obsessed with only going fast and cares nothing for the hard work of her friends and has no regard for her own health or the safety of the town irrepressible scamp that she is, drinks it.

Once she does so, she makes the fatal mistake of going "full rainbow." You never go "full rainbow!" She flies uber-fast, goes into SPAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCEEEEEE, (where she can apparently breathe and not freeze) then decides to do a "double rainboom." Seriously, she even says, "I bet I could even do a—*pauses and looks at the camera*—DOUBLE RAINBOOM!!!1!1! Really?! I was half expecting Peter Griffin to jump on the screen and say, "Ah-ha-ha-ha, she said it!"

She does it, nearly destroys all of Ponyville, then breaks the dimensional barrier. Now, since Captain Spangle is still threatening spoilers with air strikes, I can't tell you where she ends up, but I will say this: wut? Seriously, I have watched this a few times, and I still cannot comprehend where this decision came from. It's so nonsensical that I could only come up with a crappy baseball joke to describe it: it's from so far out of left field, that it's from right field again.

And this is where the whole thing really sputters out. I have wracked my brain for a while now, but I STILL cannot figure out what the writer was thinking! Okay, I could get a brief cameo, or maybe hopping through different worlds, but to spend almost ten minutes of a 25-minute episode there, I... I just... ARGH! That makes this feel more like a bad crossover fiction than an episode!

But the worst is when she finally makes it back from... ugh, there. She comes back to find almost all the town demolished... and gets no punishment. Seriously, nothing. No fines, no community service, no clean up. Matter of fact, we see the townsponies gleefully cleaning up HER mess while she sits in the library and writes a friendship report to the princess!

Random pony #1: Hey, Rainbow Dash just demolished half our town, almost all our homes, and our means of making a living, all in some vapid attempt to fly fast!

Random pony #2: Well, she had better write a damn good letter to the Princess!

 I... I can't even... how does that.... UGH!

And honestly, this section is what drags down the whole thing: the writing sucks. Like, bad. The entire thing feels and plays out like the worst kind of bad fan fiction: the kind that takes itself way too seriously, that thinks overloading on fan memes will get it in the featured box on FIMFiction, that places emphasis on references to nerdy things rather than fully-realized characters, good dialogue, and believable plot points. It felt like the writer was going out of his way to include everything he thought a fan would want to see.

Example: when Twi finishes making her little macguffin-potion, it explodes, creates a dark cloud filled with lightning, which then sprouts a trollface—yes, the actual "lol u mad" trollface—that laughs manically at them. Okay, cool, but it turns out that the potion is not evil. There is no life force in it, no evil spirit. Just... science. So... why did it have the trollface? Why did it laugh? No reason, the writer just wanted the trollface in there. Okay...

Another example: there is a thirty second Derpy scene. She doesn't talk, but she does try and eat a muffin. The problem is not that she was there. That was awesome. The problem is that we lingered on her for so long. What she did, what happened to her, was not significant enough to stay on her for so damn long. It dragged the story out, and THAT was a huge problem in itself, but I'll get to that in a minute.

Nearly all the brony memes are here: Derpy/muffin, Derpy/Doctor, Lyra/Bon Bon, Scoota-chicken. It just feels a bit forced. And Snowflake. For no! Bucking! REASON! WHATSOEVER!!!!  Seriously, why is he there?! What purpose does he serve to the narrative?! I'll tell you what: ABSO-BUCKING-LUTELY NOTHING!!!

Now, I hear you. "Tweak, isn't this a silly thing to get riled up about?" NO! NO, IT'S NOT! This is indicative of the whole problem: the author spent way too much time trying to figure out how to cram another meme or in-joke into the story, and he forgot about silly little things, like PROPER CHARACTERIZATION!!!

Oh, and also, the ending... Deus Ex Pinkamina, anyone?

CHARACTERS: Like Faith & Doubt before it, this is where things really fall apart. None of the main characters felt like themselves. Twi was short-tempered and hostile, blowing up on Rainbow Dash almost instantly. Now, some will say this was acceptable based on what Dashie was doing at the time. To which I reply, "Exactly."

The biggest issue with the characters was Rainbow Dash. In the show, she's brash, cocky. She has a huge ego, but has the talent to back it up. Yes, she loves going fast and racing... but she cares about her friends more. Here, Rainbow is an arrogant jerk. She's selfish; the instant she hears that the potion might make her go faster, she drinks it. Doesn't think for a second about Twilight's effort, or the fact that she just said she had been working on if for most of her life, just "LALWZ GOTTA GO FAST!!" But the worst is yet to come. Now, yes, we know that Dash isn't known as the smart one of the group, often chiding Twilight for being an egghead. In this, however, she's not just not smart, not stupid, not idiotic... she's a candidate for a Darwin Award. Think about this: She sees this mystery potion—one that the maker of it doesn't even know what it does—do the following:

1. Explode, ruining the lab

2. Grow a giant, swirling cloud of lightning and thunder

3. Grow a freaking face and laugh at her like it was a bad Bond villain!!!!!

... and what does she do? Drinks it. 

But the mis-characterization train doesn't stop there! When trying to perform her double rainboom, Rainbow effectively destroys half the town! Literally, you see houses destroyed, buildings demolished, ponies thrown about like garbage! And when little miss Dumb-flank gets back from the... grr, other place—which as an aside, is friggin' stupid—what is her reaction? "Heh, oops."

OOPS?!?!?! The Element of Loyalty destroys half of her hometown, and all she has to say for herself is OOPS?!?!?! People, this is levels of stupidity that would make Fred Phelps blush. The writer did to Dashie here what Spike At Your Service did for Spike: performed character assassination for the sake of moving the plot along.

STYLE AND GR—er, I mean STYLE AND ANIMATION: Good. It was... it was good.

Okay, I'll be honest, I'm not an animator. I can't draw worth a crap. My stick figures somehow come out looking like diseased mutants, and my handwriting hasn't improved since third grade. So, I may not be the most qualified to critique the art. But the animations all felt... stilted, I guess. The issue is the timing and the editing.

Back at DINFOS(Defense Information School, where the military trains its journalists), one of my instructors told us about an old saying in video editing: Editing is something that you never notice until it's done bad. And here... it's kinda bad. Shots linger for a few seconds longer than they need to, and entire scenes do the same, like the Derpy scene I talked about earlier. See, in TV, time is money, every single second of airtime is precious, so shows have to be johnny-on-the-spot with editing. Not a second can be wasted. Here, they are wasted.

The music was great. All the background tracks sounded like they would be right from the show. The voice actors were.... eh, pretty good. Whoever did Rainbow Dash seriously needs a better mic.

But those are just minor things, honestly. For the most part, it did look and sound great.

OVERALL AWESOMENESS: *sigh* Okay. I'm facing a bit of a crisis here.

On the one hand, I realize this is what it is: a fan-made love letter to Lauren Faust and the amazing world(s) she has created for us, as well as a tribute to the quirky, amazing culture that was spawned from them. It is a labor of love from a dedicated and talented fan, one that took countless man-hours of work to create. It's not perfect, but then who was expecting that? This isn't something he got paid to do, this is something he did for the same reason I wrote my fan fiction: we were inspired by this amazing world, its rich characters and compelling stories.

And that is the problem. They spent so much time worrying about the animation, the music, and the voices, but they forgot about what makes My Little Pony so special and great: the characters and the story! I'm not slandering what they spent weeks, months, over a year working on; what I am saying is the base of what they started with, the story itself, is crap! And no level of polish is going to get a shine out of this turd of a tale.

No doubt, a lot of you reading right now are angry with me. You think I'm nitpicking, I'm being overly-critical and negative. To which I say, "Um, hello? Drill Sergeant." But most of you are saying this: "But Tweak, it's a fan made project! Of course it's not gonna be perfect! Of course it's gonna have flaws!"

Okay, since when is that an excuse? I have had long, drawn-out arguments on the fact that "It's Just Fan Fiction" is not an excuse for low-quality in fiction. I worked my butt off to make my fan fiction the best it can be, as have hundreds of authors. Equestria Daily put my story through the wringer before they said it was worthy of posting, and they do the same to countless stories every day!

I'm getting a bit long-winded here, so I'll wrap up. All in all, this is a great example of what the fandom can do when it wants to. A lot of very talented people worked their butts off to make this, and they should all be commended for what they did for it. However, all of that cannot change the fact that the story was lame, the characters were off, and it feels like the writer lost focus of what he was doing.

Now, one final remark: this is a school project. Now, maybe that is the reason for going to.... ugh, you know... and that's why he did it, because he had to for the assignment. The truth is, we have no idea what kind of requirements were placed on him in that regards, and that is the only thing that saves this from a fully-negative rating.

So, final call?

It looked and sounded beautiful, but the heart of it, the story, was... well, I think Knighty from FIMFiction.net said it best: "Next time someone makes a fan episode, how about they look to one of the many talented writers we have instead of attempting to write it themselves because they think it's easy?"

Yup.

PONY STRONG, HOOAH!

From front to rear, disappear!

AND WHY THE HELL WAS SNOWFLAKE THERE?!




SEMPER FILLY!