Aug
10th
2017
Points of Canon: S2x15 - The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000 · 4:43pm Aug 10th, 2017
Technology! Or lack thereof…
There’s quite a bit odd about this episode, to be honest, making me think that something is missing.
- So why is Rainbow insisting on waking Fluttershy up before sunrise just for a spot in line? Sounds unusually altruistic for Rainbow, especially considering that Fluttershy is not anywhere as excited about cider at all. Notably, Rainbow doesn’t wake up Twilight or Rarity to go there. Does she anticipate a limit of N per customer and hopes to exploit Fluttershy’s share? Because no such limit materializes.
- Fluttershy covering herself once Rainbow pulls her blanket off is cute, but the cultural motivation for this is not entirely clear.
- When Rainbow starts pushing Fluttershy by the rump, Fluttershy is inert – but seconds later, we see her wings flapping even though she’s still half asleep. Must be an instinctive reaction. Eventually Rainbow releases her, and Fluttershy continues flying – while her body remains stretched out vertically.
- “Don’t you remember what happened last year? Or the year before that? Or pretty much any cider season ever?” I’m not sure if we can conclude they were particularly friendly based on that or not, but I’m sure we can conclude that both Rainbow and Fluttershy have been in town for at least three years and probably longer.
- “Pinkie Pie. She always ends up ahead of us in line, and then they always run out of cider!” I.e. Rainbow knew Pinkie before Summer 1, but everyone knows Pinkie.
- Pinkie sports a custom tent with pink patterns and her cutie mark. Seeing how often she sports custom accessories, that party planner profession pays pretty penny.
- Pinkie’s tent opens with a zipper. This is not the only thing that is seen with a zipper in Equestria, but in the airing order it’s probably the first.
- “I couldn’t sleep last night ’cause I was so excited about cider season, and I had this brilliant idea to come down here and camp out, so I told a few others about it, and they all thought it was a great idea too, and now it’s just a big old cider party!” I.e. Applejack should pay Pinkie for promotion and marketing – we have on the scale of 30 tents here.
- At the start of the whole exercise, we can see 14 barrels of prepared cider and no apparatus for cider production. I can’t measure the barrel exactly, but eyeballing it, we’re talking over 4700 liters here. Assuming really big, 1-liter mugs, that’s potentially 4700 ponies served, but many are taking more than one, so…
- Canterlot Friends are the first in line, naturally.
- The size of this line is one of our sources for the estimate of Ponyville population. And I just noticed my eyeball of prepared cider volume is very close to what’s calculated in there.
- How Rainbow ended up a kilometer away from the start of the line when Twilight and Rarity are so very close to the start is a mystery, because, as I said above, there weren’t nearly enough tents to transform into that long of a line.
- “Isn’t this exciting, Spike? Opening day of cider season!” “Yeah! That means it’s only thirty more days ’til sapphire season!” We never find out when sapphire season is for sure, though it is yet another line indicating that gems in Equestria grow. It has also been suggested that A Dog and Pony Show happens during sapphire season, though while it would make sense, it hardly has to.
- Notice that Twilight is still excited about town tourist traps. I’m pretty sure this is Autumn 1.
- Applejack uses a megaphone, the same one Granny Smith used for the Sisterhooves Social
- We can say nothing useful based on the quantity of coins Pinkie drops into the box, but she does walk away – on two legs – carrying something on the scale of 15 mugs. Considering that Rainbow dropped two coins into the box for just one mug, we have to conclude that Pinkie paid in one cent coins just to mess with us.
- The face Cherilee makes… Oh that face. With a wrong eye color.
- The Canterlot Friends are all complaining too. They apparently wanted more cider.
- “But Apple family cider is made with love and integrity, and only the highest quality apples in Equestria.” Ok, three ingredients – love, integrity, highest quality apples. Which one have you run out of?…
- “If y’all just be patient, we’ll have plenty more tomorrow.” That is, the cider season is called that because this is the period during which the Apples serve cider.
- The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000 is the earliest – and nearly only – example of a self-propelled ground vehicle that isn’t a rail vehicle. The only other one I can think of is Cheese Sandwich’s tank.
- Interesting, I don’t see any foals in line for the cider, not counting Spike, but one turns up once the SSCS6000 rolls in. Then disappears.
- Jacob’s ladder is included in the device only for show, of course, but notably, it appears to be steam powered otherwise. Even then, it requires a spell to get going anyway.
Flim is the one with the mustache, Flam is the one without. Don’t forget.Screw it, just check the wiki next time, I give up on telling which is which.- “We’re the world famous Flim Flam Brothers.” I’m not sure if we can conclude from this line that their names are “Flim Flimflam” and “Flam Flimflam” respectively. Sounds more like “Flim” and “Flam” to me, and they just aren’t singing the implied ampersand.
- “Any horse can make a claim and any pony can do the same” So you mean sapient horses exist?
- Rarity is swooning, she’s clearly charmed.
- “Well, Granny, I’m glad you brought that up, my dear, I say I’m glad you brought that up” Notice that nobody introduced Granny Smith to them.
- Granny Smith finds the cider good, but won’t admit it.
- “So whaddaya say then, Apples?” This whole thing has to be a targeted operation, they aren’t just traveling randomly with a highly specialized device.
- “Cider sales keep our business afloat through the winter. We’d lose Sweet Apple Acres if we agreed to this.” Strictly speaking, this can only happen if Sweet Apple Acres is in significant debt, though, Applejack didn’t say they would lose the farm immediately.
So let’s get this straight:
- Apple Bloom “accepts” a deal well before she knows what the deal is, but seeing as how Flim and Flam advertise themselves as salesponies, the deal is the sale of SSCS6000. Granny rejects this deal.
The second deal offered is a rental:
- Apples supply the raw apples.
- Flim & Flam supply the SSCS6000.
- Any profits from the enterprise are split, 75%/25%, with 75% going to Flim & Flam.
- Upon Granny rejecting this, Flim & Flam declare intention to compete, but – where are they supposed to be getting the apples?…
- “Oh, for Pete’s sake!” No, I’m pretty sure there’s a specific Pete that Rainbow knows, she mentions him too often. A human who stumbled in from Everfree?
“You can’t sell that cider! That’s made from Apple family apples!” Three questions:
- How does she know, without even tasting it?
- If they were obtained illegally, why doesn’t she just press charges?
- If they were obtained legally, why don’t Flim and Flam press charges?
Once that is out of the way, another deal emerges:
- Whoever produces the most barrels in one hour wins the exclusive right to sell cider in Ponyville.
- Should Flim & Flam lose this bet, they agree to never show up in Ponyville again.
- For the execution of this bet, Granny Smith permits Flim & Flam to use the apples from the south field.
Frankly, I’m not sure this kind of bet would be legal in any kind of sane jurisdiction if executed exactly as worded – unless Apple Family has that exclusive right through whatever licensed means. But if they do, Applejack would not have to cite “That’s made from Apple family apples!” to dissuade Flim & Flam. If it’s merely an agreement to withdraw from the market upon losing the bet, it works.
- “Don’t worry, Applejack, I know you’ll win tomorrow!” “We’d better, ’cause if we don’t, we’re gonna lose our farm.” Since the farm is not the object of any of the above described deals as they are described, it has to be heavily mortgaged.
- The above described sequence of events takes two days to execute, the duel happens on the third day of the “cider season.”
- Granny Smith is wearing glasses. With a pearly cord around the neck. I don’t think we ever saw her actually wearing glasses of her own volition before, though Family Appreciation Day had Apple Bloom put fake glasses on her.
- Mayor Mare arrives to be the arbiter and to make the entire event into yet another tourist show. But she alters the deal: “The teams have one hour to produce as much cider as they can, after which the barrels will be counted and the winner will be named the sole cider provider for all of Ponyville!” Even the crowd reacts with surprise. This makes the whole thing magnitudes worse for no real gain to her or the town, let alone the Apples, so what’s her angle here?
- The Doctor / Time Turner is acting as the timekeeper for this competition.
- Finally, we see the Apples’ actual cider making process: Pony-powered apple grinder and a presumed rather primitive press. SSCS6000 is six times faster than this process when adequate quality control is enabled, three times faster as the Apples ramp up, and only 0.6 as fast once the Mane 5 join in. Notice that even for the Apples, the bottleneck seems to be quality control rather than anything else.
- “Rest when it’s over, Big McIntosh! Ride! Ride!” The verb “to ride” is used to describe a pony running.
- “We don’t care if the whole kingdom of Canterlot helps.” Kingdom of Canterlot exists. And I’m pretty sure they mean a territorial subdivision of Equestria, because if the entire Equestria showed up to help, they would lose.
- Fluttershy’s method of getting apples out of the trees is rather unorthodox: Instead of bucking them, she flies into the crown and shakes the tree.
- Doubling the power on SSCS6000 results in it sucking entire trees in together with the apples. Didn’t they know this sort of thing would happen? They elect to keep the power at the double setting and turn off the quality control, but turning off the quality control and reducing the power back to normal levels would have to produce cider that would actually be drinkable – what wrecks their process is sucking in huge amounts of detritus. Did they actually design the device themselves?
The final amount of cider produced by both teams is on the scale of 100 barrels, but here’s a thing:
- Most of the Flim & Flam product is unsaleable, its ownership murky, while the apples are, well, spent.
- Huge amounts of apples have been spent in producing cider which, according to Granny Smith’s statement in Where the Apple Lies, does not keep at all. Much of it what remains will inevitably end up unsold.
In the end, the whole thing had to have done the Apples significant economic damage that nobody will compensate.
There was a way for them to win this cleanly, I’m pretty sure.
- “Now should we tear down all these tacky old buildings and put up new ones, brother?” Now why in hell would they have a legal right to do that? I’m pretty sure they do not. Then again, them saying that does not really imply they do. That Applejack says “C’mon, Apples. Let’s go pack up our things,” does, however. So how would that happen? Even if the exclusive right to sell cider in Ponyville indeed belongs to the Flim & Flam brothers as a result of this bet, for which they would have to thank Mayor Mare, they can’t really make use of it without buying apples from the Apples, can they?…
- “I wouldn’t pay one cent for this dreck!” Yes, cents exist. Also, ponies use the word “drek.”
- Applejack narrates a Lesson Zero-pattern letter to Celestia, however, she is not shown writing it or sending it, so this is not a hard bound.
Analysis:
- We’re missing a rather large piece: namely, at what point, Sweet Apple Acres being mortgaged could possibly become a license for Flim & Flam to do what they please with it?
- This whole thing is clearly a calculated plan targeting the Apples specifically. Which means that, in the case of Apples agreeing to the first deal – the sale of SSCS6000 – Flim and Flam would have an underhanded way to win everything anyway. How exactly would that work?
- What is Mayor Mare’s angle? She ups the stakes for no observable reason.
- Did Flim and Flam actually invent the machine themselves? Does not sound like it to me.
- Did an incident of illegally using the Sweet Apple Acres apples actually happen on the second day or not? Why did not anyone try to involve the law? They involved the mayor on the third day, after all.
- So is cider alcoholic or not? The faces of all the ponies drinking it – as well as the dearth of foals for the entire episode – implies that it is. The manufacturing technology depicted would only produce an alcoholic drink if the apples were alcoholic by themselves. Which is not out of the question with earth ponies, but is more than a bit dubious.
It’s all questions and no good answers yet.
All I know is that from my UK perspective, cider only refers to the alcoholic drink, so I never thought of the cider being anything but.
Only now do I realize that there's a joke to be made about Pinkie camping out so she could be the first to purchase a new Apple product.
Saddle Arabians, certainly.
Yeah, there are definitely a few leaps of logic here that audience doesn't get to see. And given how this is by far the most technologically advanced scheme the Flimflams ever try to pull, I suspect they're more Edisons than Teslas, only with far less business sense. Who looks at the automobile and sees only a chance to undermine an orchard?
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I’m betting it has been done already, but once more wouldn’t hurt.
We haven’t heard them referred to as horses on screen unambiguously, but maybe they are called such.
I openly doubt they are inventors of this particular device, or, well, anything.
They certainly can operate machinery, including some complex specimens, but there’s no canonical reason to believe they invented any of it. Also, the way they did not anticipate the particular failure mode of the SSCS6000 that they bump into makes me think they didn’t make the device.
Who made the thing? I don’t know, but I bet it wasn’t named “Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000” when it was born. This is explicitly a con plan that made use of a window of opportunity created by the cider season and increased demand that the Apples could not normally satisfy. The SSCS6000 is very likely not economical without this con plan.
That's what makes them run away in the end, even, once they realize they can't recoup their losses.
It’s actually “For Peat’s sake!”, referencing the dried Sphagnum salespony Peat Moss.
4629769
So why is Rainbow concerned about his love, then?
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Don't judge. I've seen her shipped with worse.
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I’m not judging, just, if she has to be shipped with Mr. Peat, I want to see this story. For reference purposes.
I like to think that Flim and Flam are time travelers from the future. They had a beef with either the elderly Applejack or her descendants for distrusting them, so they took some technology from their time and jumped back, to get their revenge on the Apple clan by surprise. When that first revenge attempt came to nothing, they jumped back further in time, to try again and maintain the element of surprise... and lather, rinse, repeat. (They never quite figure out that their own time-travel shenanigans are the ironic reason why the future Apples distrust them so much.)
It would explain away one apparent contradiction: in “Viva Las Pegasus”, when Flim and Flam claim that Applejack never lies, they’re remembering some other encounters from AJ’s future. For them, “Leap of Faith” has yet to happen.
Probably not, considering how much has been made of cider’s short shelf life. Alcohol would inhibit the growth of bacteria and make the cider last longer.
4629844
That’s certainly original. How does this sit with the Flim & Flam timeline in The Cutie Re-Mark, though?
4629849
Man, even without throwing time travel into the mix, I have no bloody clue how or why they would try to take over Equestria in an alternate timeline.
Rainbow needs someone to hold her place in line during bathroom breaks.
Wink wink, say no more!
Or the rock farm does, and her parents gave her trust fund. I mean, they paid for Maud's PhR....
Would anyone besides Spike get excited about sapphire season?
Probably they devised it so that magic provides the heat to generate steam.
I always get that wrong!
I think the names come from episode credits, but I'm not sure.
Given their cutie marks, and the fact that they look like they could be Apple Bloom's brothers, my guess is these are rogue members of the Apple family, shunned after they or their parents did something unforgivable, like consort with Gran Pear. This is their plan to muscle into the Apple business in central Equestria.
Not if Applejack means they would have to sell SWA to feed themselves come winter if they don't have cider money. Though the question of why they don't get a loan of some kind becomes pertinent.
He's a bouncer to the Wonderbolts stadium in Cloudsdale. If your name is on the good list, then you get to go in. Otherwise Pete sends you back down...
They bought it legally, didn't press charges because this is all building towards their plan of goading the Apples into a contest.
I feel like it has to be. I mean, Flim and Flam lost, and they weren't legally escorted out of town in S4 when they showed up again.
She got confused on what the terms were. I doubt Mayor Mare has the power to grant monopolies like that, she just assumes that no other business will challenge the winner for Ponyville cider sales.
I think this is just hyperbole. If every citizen of only Canterlot actually showed up and helped, of course the Flim Flam brothers would still lose, and they have to know that.
Given that we never see anyone else with that kind of magic-based technology, and their next device is fairly similar, I think we can assume they built it. They know their cider will be crap, just count on winning the bet on pure volume. The fact that this will immediately ruin their relationship with customers is a sign of the Brother's letting their short-term greed overwhelm their long-term business sense. Remember, this is the only time things don't go according to plan and the Brothers have to improvise, before then they were just working off a carefully-considered plot.
The only way this ends up netting the Apples even a fairly small loss is if all the extra cider made by the Mane 5, and the additional sales driven by sympathy/loyalty from the rest of the town, makes up for all those damaged trees and wasted apples. But that in turn implies that the bottleneck to profitability isn't apples, it's the amount of time the Apple family is normally willing to spend making cider. We never get a reason the Apples don't just make more money by doubling the length of Cider Season, which is just a marketing stunt they created. (If a bar makes 90% of its profit during happy hour, they can always extend happy hour).
No good answers. Least dumb guess is that the Apples don't want the ponies of Ponyville to go without cider, so they...just gave the farm to the FlimFlam Brothers? Maybe the FlimFlam Brothers already came up with some kind of contingency agreement off-screen with the Apples that if they won, FlimFlam would pay them for property over a period of time?
Perhaps the magical portion of the device can only be worked by the brothers, so they can charge ruinous service fees to power the device? (Twilight might be able to figure it out anyway, but the Brothers don't realize that).
How much money did Applejack bring back to fix up town-hall? That's why! No seriously, I think she just made a mistake.
I dunno, it sures seems like it to me. They know the device very well, and they have another similar device in S4.
I think the Mayor was there in a ceremonial capacity, like a ribbon-cutting, it was a gentleman's wager.
This cider isn't, but the stored (fermented) cider that Granny Smith sells to Filthy Rich in S6 is.
4630009
Well, that works, I suppose…
Rarity would need the sapphires. In Sisterhooves Social she had to buy a full grocery bag…
I prefer to ignore those. They will, on occasion, say “Applebloom” instead of “Apple Bloom,” for example.
That sort of thing is possible, but Granny Smith never brings it up in Friends Forever #9 – their particular feud probably starts well before the Ponyville Apples become, well, Apples. Cause Granny Smith refers to her parents as “the Smith family.”
Will someone write a fic to settle this conclusively already?… :)
We don’t know that, though. And if anyone has that power, she would be that anyone.
See my comment above. I don’t buy it. :)
Juice is not the most profitable way to use fruit in general. To get 100% pure juice, i.e. сider@US, you generally need to mulch and squeeze five times the weight of the fruit or so. Which is why special cultivars exist, and these probably are only efficient to grow in a specific season.
The only reasonable thing I can think of is this sequence:
4630009
Actually, you've gotten the names of the unicorn brothers right, and Oliver is wrong. The song specifically has the brothers say "He's Flim/He's Flam". The mustachioed one has the first line, indicating that Flim is the baby-faced one (who for some reason I always think of as the thin one despite them being twins) and Flam is the mustache.
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In a universe where Applejack doesn't see the Rainboom and stays with the Oranges, she eventually adjusts to that lifestyle and the Apples probably start a policy of hiring non-Apples just to make up the horsepower. Depending on if you feel like headcanon-ing friendship, the Flim Flam brothers either had an easier time conning the Apples thanks to the lack of Stubborn Jack, or became their employees and rose through the ranks by just being good at their jobs.
From that point, some manner of cataclysm, usually the combined effort of dealing with the entire show's villain roster without the Mane Six causing Celestia to die, ponykind has to undergo an industrial revolution in order to stay alive, and Flim and Flam's position of power within the Apple clan allows them to usher in this new era expertly. In one case, they just industrialized everything and pretended they had control of the sun while secretly keeping her locked up in a basement. In another, they built a Fallout-style vault to hide Equestria away from the unmoving sun.
Plausible enough?
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Plausible enough, if we accept that Flim and Flam are actually in charge in that particular timeline. Because, upon thinking it over, I’m not so sure that they are:
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Just double-checked for the sixteenth time. The first line is “He’s Flim” and at that moment, the baby-faced one is on on screen, pointing towards the left, to the mustachioed one.
4630436
Is this the part where I source the wiki and official merchandise that the baby-faced one is Flim, or do I source the second time in the song where they sing those lyrics and Mustache has the first line?
Or shall I source the fact that the two of them have different voices, and regardless of what part of the song you can still hear Mustache's voice saying the first line?
Or the part where, in the part you're mentioning, "He's Flim" is said during a motion blur and Baby-face's lip flaps only actually sync up when he's saying "He's Flam"?
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Why didn’t you start with the official merchandise then? :P
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3.bp.blogspot.com/-Wdcd062qlxs/VIiectZGKoI/AAAAAAAAJV8/OrQwoRN68Vo/s800/mlp-wave-8-flim-blind-bag-card.jpg
Because I thought the song had enough evidence.
4630454
...where'd the "Skim" come from?!
4630456
Rhyming? Nothing I could find refers to Flam with a surname, so we're left to conclude either parents with weird twin naming or a clone.
"Who would cut in line in front of Fluttershy?"
Wizarding Tents? Smaller on the outside?
Labor, clearly.You have concluded this.I believe them to be Apples.
Evidence.
Pterippus magic is exerted through flight. It's not a cloud, so bucking it won't bring that to bear. On the other hand, she doesn't stick to wing-power when wrestling bears, and her "wing power" in terms of wind generation is incredibly low…if she's in public.
…which they could bring as vandalism or perhaps herbicide ("Bloomberg! No!") charges.
I'm given to understand fruit can ferment without magic.
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The Netflix version of "Where the Apple Lies" 'censors' all cider references to juice.
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That's suggesting that they invented it right there.
4630009
Next device? What, that they use for a slideshow?
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Which makes the SAA mortgage fall into the FFbros' creditors' hooves…which, I guess, are again reasonable ones. Guess that's not a flaw.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skimming_(fraud)
which leads to a bit of "Who would name their foal that??" like with Spoiled Milk.
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Well, someone did, because Rainbow still didn’t get any cider, did she?
It’s more a question of their number than size.
But here’s a thing: Applebuck Season has Rainbow bucking the trees and Fluttershy standing next to a bucket as if she just did the same.
Yes. But normally, not until they’re off the tree, and what’s importantly, the fermented ones would be the ones they sorted out rather than in.
There’s also an interesting side consideration: We also know that only Filthy Rich can be relied on purchasing the tons of apples the Apples constantly produce, and he has been consistently taking Granny’s side when given a choice.
They planned to run one way or another, probably expecting to sell the farm – and probably, to Filthy Rich, who would give it back to Granny…