The real dance magic: time travel · 4:55pm Jun 27th, 2017
While watching “Dance Magic”, a plethora of questions popped into my head. Why bother with a deadline to raise repair money? Why are the Crystal Prep girls raising money for a spring dance if Everfree is a summer camp? Why is school apparently fully in session during the summer? What the heck is going on?
The answer to all those questions is simple—and a bit annoying. According to director Ishi Rudell, the short originally was supposed to be a prequel to Legend of Everfree, not a sequel. In that context, all the temporal references make perfect sense. The girls are raising money to afford the trip to Everfree—which incidentally makes Celestia’s congratulatory comment during the initial bus-trip scene a call-back as well as an expository explanation—and for that there absolutely would be a deadline. The reference to a spring dance no doubt was meant to establish a time reference, essentially confirming Everfree is a summer camp, but that backfires badly with the changes. And of course school is in session during the spring.
The decision to bump the story from before to after Legend of Everfree came in the midst of production, a classic case of changing horses in midstream. (Yes, yes, I know.) Presumably it was too late to change the scenes taking place at CPA; on the other hand, one could make a case that CHS might have a fairly lenient policy about using school facilities during summer break, since the latter isn’t shown with halls full of students. Why they didn’t re-record the dialog mentioning the spring dance I’m not sure, since they were able to do so for other lines. (The simplest solution would be to redact the word “spring” and leave it at that.)
In my view the change was unnecessary and indeed counterproductive. There’s no reason the short couldn’t have been left as a prequel, with its successors taking place after the camp trip. I’d hazard a guess someone thought it would confuse the audience, which is rather insulting when one thinks about it. If the idea was “the mall wouldn’t still be playing the music video that much later”, my response would be to laugh; of course they’d play it to death for months afterward!
The final and most urgent question was how I’d have to recast the timeline I’d created and how much of a pain it would be. Now that I understand what happened, though, I can ignore the (unintended) discrepancies and feel reasonably safe in leaving the timing as-is.
It does explain quite a lot. And, as with all matters of temporal confusion in FiM, I'm going to blame Starlight Glimmer on the Watsonian level.
That's actually a really good catch. :O I'll admit I hadn't considered the temporal discrepancies, but the mall playing the video actually makes more sense if LoE happens between Dance and Movie Magic. Plus, going to visit a movie set is more of a "do when school is out" activity.
All good points, but also consider the difficulties in hiring a yacth larger enough to house the attending CPA students. That amount would surely be more than the amount required to simply attend a summer camp. Deposit, cost of fuel, and lead time since such vessels are likely booked in advance.
Also, CHS is a public institution while CPA is styled as a private school, possibly even one that contains dormitories. While I acknowledge that not all private schools would fit his, ge one near me goes ten mongs out of the year, allowing two weeks for Christmas and six for summer.
And yet, no Indigo Zap?
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I’m not familiar with private schools, so I can’t speak to what Ms. Berrow’s model for CPA might be, but I’m prepared to grant that one. As for the yacht, my bet based on Occam’s Razor is a time frame of weeks, since a deadline is looming, and the owners almost certainly offer package pricing to keep things as simple as possible. Certainly that’s how I would write it. I noticed the dialog never states any amounts explicitly—which was smart—though the implication is they split the money fifty-fifty.
Even leaving aside those questions, though, the remaining discrepancies were glaring enough to make the problem abundantly clear, and the explanation was simple enough. As a member of the audience, it did jab me with a sharp stick. As a fan-fiction writer it made me tear my hair until I saw Mr. Rudell’s comments. According to him, by the way, Indigo Zap is on vacation with her parents at the time. Five bits says in reality she got overlooked until it was too late to drop her into the script, or the voice actress wasn’t available, or something of the sort.
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I'd bet on overlooked, since shes voiced by the ame actress as Starlight.