Doctor Perseus Reviews: "Double Rainboom" Revisited · 2:16am Sep 12th, 2014
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In Double Rainboom, Twilight finally finishes a talent enhancer that she's been working on since magic kindergarten. However, things take a turn for the crazy when Rainbow Dash ends up drinking the potion and begins rocketing through Ponyville due to her boosted flying talent. But not even Twilight knows of what's to happen next...
Double Rainboom was literally one of the first things I reviewed on this site. At the time it was released, I had only just barely starting blogging here and the thought of writing reviews hadn't even crossed my mind (you can thank Part 2 of Doctor Who: Series 7 for inspiring me to keep writing reviews). And, looking back at my "review" of Double Rainboom, I'm not satisfied with it. I mushed it into a single blog post with my review of The Bells of Saint John and, honestly, my thoughts of it back then don't reflect what I think of it now. I recently decided to give it a re-watch and...well...it hasn't exactly aged well, in my opinion. So, it's time to take a trip into the past and re-review Double Rainboom!
I want to start things off by saying that if I reviewed Double Rainboom solely on its animation, music, and voice acting it would score quite highly with me. Considering that it was made by a group of college students with no budget is actually quite impressive. While the animation isn't as "show-accurate" as it was hyped up to be, it was still really good. There's lots of nice original music tracks throughout the episode and the voice actors all do really good jobs (especially those who voiced the Powerpuff Girls). So, if anything, the animation, music, and voice acting are the highlights of the episode. But those aren't the only things that make an episode. Now it's time to talk about, well, everything else and see just where this fan episode went wrong.
When I first saw Double Rainboom, it "entertained" me and I even gave it a fairly positive review the first time around. But that was all based on my first viewing and, now that I've had well over a year to further think about the episode and re-watch it a couple times, I can safely say that my enjoyment of the episode has decreased considerably. Like I said earlier, if I based my thoughts solely on the technical aspects, this episode would be about a 9.5/10 for me. But after taking everything else in (the writing, the characters, the story, etc), the episode, in my opinion, really isn't that good.
Now the start of the episode is pretty promising. The opening credits are nice and the first scene with Twilight, Rainbow Dash, and the potion is really entertaining. In all honestly, I don't really have any gripes with the first few scenes of the episode. It isn't until Rainbow Dash starts crashing about Ponyville that things start to go downhill. One of the biggest problems with this episode is its need to shove in as many references and memes as possible just for the sake of having them there. I mean, we've got them all. Scootaloo chicken jokes, Doctor Whooves, background characters galore, etc, etc. Using a few references here and there is okay but it's much better when they either serve a purpose or are used sparingly. To just throw in a bunch of references just for the hell of it makes everything feel forced and crowded. If anything, this episode feels more like a parody of MLP than an actual episode of the show. Excuse me, I remember this being advertised as the first fan-made episode of MLP, not the first fan-made parody episode of MLP. However, I admit that I share the "reference problem" with this episode. I've done similar stuff like that in several of my stories: throwing in tons of references here and there to things I like. It's something that I'm working on pushing myself away from.
Anyway, back to business. Along with being clustered with tons of memes and references (which were, in all honesty, more fun to point out than actually watching the episode), Double Rainboom also feels very mean-spirited at times. The joke involving Derpy and the flower pot felt needlessly cruel and the whole third act with the Powerpuff Girls was...just...UGH!
Even back when I first saw this episode, the crossover segment rubbed me the wrong way. At the time, I couldn't really figure out why. But now I can. It's because the Powerpuff Girls are complete assholes here. I mean, they sadistically beat up the retreating monster for the sake of producing another mean-spirited joke (which was extremely out of character for them) and they chase after Rainbow Dash and try to capture her like they're Kraven the Hunter or something. If anything, the Powerpuff Girls acted more like Princess Morbucks than they did themselves. Then just when Rainbow Dash is about to be captured by the OOC PPG, she's rescued via Deus ex Pinkamena. Though, to be fair, the bit with Pinkie Pie being able to pass through the walls of dimensions after drinking the talent enhancer feels like a fitting extension of her 4th Wall-breaking abilities.
The episode picked up a little bit at the end. The final scene was enjoyable (aside from the pretty tacked on "don't take things that don't belong to you" moral) and the ending shot of Twilight, Rainbow Dash, and Spike reacting to Bloo admittedly still makes me chuckle to this day. We then move on to the ending credits, which are accompanied by an awesome original piece of music and pictures featuring MLP and PPG characters interacting with each other (which, to be honest, represented a crossover between MLP and PPG WAY better than the actual crossover we got in the episode).
Overall, in my opinion, Double Rainboom is a pretty poor episode. While the animation, music, and voice acting are truly impressive and worthy of praise, the rest of the episode falls flat. I'll admit that Twilight and Rainbow Dash remain likable and in-character and that there are a few good scenes and chuckle-worthy jokes; but the main story of the episode is filled to the brim with needless memes and references, a lot of the jokes are mean-spirited, the personalities of the Powerpuff Girls are so butchered that I'm surprised Leatherface hasn't made a mask out of the remains, and the ending moral feels pretty tacked on. If any of you reading this still enjoy this fan episode and disagree with me, then I'm happy for you. Continue to like/love it to your heart's content. Even I can go back to it from time to time and re-watch the enjoyable bits. But, in conclusion, I just find this fan episode to not only be a poor tribute to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic but an even WORSE tribute to The Powerpuff Girls. And what burns me up even more is that it's clear that the writers knew how to make a good MLP/PPG crossover! The pictures seen throughout the ending credits are proof of that! Why they went with such a horrible crossover idea and kept the better ideas for the ending credits, I will never know. In the end, I give Double Rainboom a 3.5/10, a bad episode.
There are a few more of my past reviews that I'm planning to follow up on so expect to see more revisited reviews in the future. Anyway, what do the rest of you think about Double Rainboom? Did you like it when it was first released and still continue to enjoy it? Did you, like me, enjoy at first but grow to dislike it over time? Or did you dislike it from the get-go? I'm always interested to hear the thoughts and opinions of others.
I have always believed that "Snowdrop" was a better fan episode than "Double Rainboom". I agree that on a technical level "Double Rainboom" is very well done. The abundant references didn't bother me. I like lots of references. I noticed that many did not like the whole crossover with the Powerpuff Girls because it supposedly didn't make sense. I didn't mind it because I loved watching The Powerpuff Girls as a kid. It's been years since I've seen The Powerpuff Girls though. (Except for that special they did a few months back, but I'm not sure if that really counted because the radical change in animation.) So, I feel I can't make much of an assessment as to how out of character the Powerpuff Girls may have been. In the end, I did not think "Double Rainboom" was completely awful.
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Neither do I, to an extent. It's not the worst thing I've seen and, as I pointed out in my review, it does have its share of pros. But it's, in my opinion, the poor writing, mean-spirited humor, and terrible representation of the Powerpuff Girls that make it a bad episode. It's a shame the episode turned out to be not all that good even with all the work that was obviously put into it.
If you want a further review/analysis of Double Rainboom then I highly recommend that you check out Eli Stone's review of it here.