My Little Pony: The Princess Promenade (Review)

Guess who took seven months to finish reviewing these! Yep, I'm finally done procrastinating, and I'm here to review the final G3 special that I planned to review. For the record, I'm not watching those two 11 minute... things out of respect for my own life. I'm also going to review this the same way I reviewed the first few specials, since I didn't like how my previous review came out. After this, I promise my next blog will be out before the end of the month. Without further ado, let's finish this!

My Little Pony: The Princess Promenade (Review)

Let's start off by summarizing the plot. As usual, there's plenty of filler, as it takes several minutes of songs to start, and the main conflict doesn't even start until about halfway through. Wisteria, Pinkie Pie, and a yellow breezy with a stupid name end up in an underground cave while attempting to pull a weed (it's a little less stupid in context). Down there, they wake up Spike, an annoying dragon who slept for 1,000 years, and had a special flower with him. Because Wisteria was the first pony to touch the flower, she becomes a princess, and Spike guides her on how to act like one. This special surprisingly has two conflicts, one being that Wisteria doesn't want to act like a princess, and the other being that the other ponies are setting up her promenade, and are having difficulties doing it in time without her help. She manages to convince Spike to let her be a princess however she wants, and she helps fix up the promenade at the end.

Now let's talk about issues exclusive to this special. Spike is selfish, as all he cares about is making Wisteria act "like a princess," and when she eventually refuses, he tries guilt-tripping her into doing so. He's also convinced otherwise offscreen (we'll get to that), so you don't feel his turnaround. Aside from that, he's just as uninteresting as everyone else in G3. Also, in order for Wisteria to save the day by fixing the promenade, they had to make the other ponies incompetent to a ridiculous degree, including Minty and Pinkie somehow building separate things on the same float without noticing. Wisteria was supposed to plan the promenade, but she couldn't because she was a princess, and no one else could, for some reason. It's not like she was established as the best planner in Ponyville, or anything, because G3 doesn't like establishing characters. Even if she was, surely someone else in the town could've planned it instead. As for the other conflict, I don't think the writers even knew how to solve it! As I said earlier, Wisteria convinced Spike off screen, and we never learn how. Spike was refusing to listen earlier, and yet Wisteria did something, and now the problem's solved. No one actually bothered to write a solution to the conflict. It's like a Deus Ex Machina, without there actually being a Deus Ex Machina!

As for other notes, the running gag of the yellow breezy sniffing flowers and sneezing repeated too often, but only in the first half of the special. After that, it just stopped (although, she didn't appear as much in the second half). There was also an unfunny running gag of Spike referencing/mixing up other fairy tales. And at the end, Wisteria decided that everyone was a princess, and yes, they did the stupid thing where they indicated that, you, the person watching, were a princesses. The only other thing to mention is that the Netflix captions said "ominous music playing" when a very brief non-ominous instrumental of the My Little Pony theme played to transition a scene. It was the only thing that made me laugh, and it is honestly more correct than it should be, given G3's quality. Aside from that, every other problem from G3 carries over: the bad songs, bad animation, unnatural dialogue, flat characters, and probably several other issues I've forgotten at this point, since my brain is trying hard to forget these specials. If there's one good thing to say, it's that I'm finally done. I no longer have to stress about eventually doing this, and I don't have to sit through these things anymore. A huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders, and I can finally start working on other things soon.