He's gonna take you back to the past · 6:57am Feb 4th, 2018
I looked up recently and realized that it has actually been YEARS since I've watched any of Season 1. I was curious to see how it would hold up after all of the advancements in storytelling and graphics that have taken place over the years, so I selected a few of my personal favorites for revisiting.
Look Before You Sleep: Many things struck me about this episode. How flat and half-assed the animation looks, how little anybody cares about the universal continuity (there's an Earth Pony in the very first scene who picks up a branch in the background with a magic aura), and in general how unrefined the show as a whole really was. While this was the germ that gave birth to the amazing Applejack/Rarity dynamic that has made the pair easily the most popular "odd couple" in the franchise, it really doesn't hold up against all of their future encounters. A personal favorite still, but it feels like a fairly tame and cookie-cutter episode.
Swarm of the Century: Holy awkward faces. The facial stylings throughout season 1 were actually quite horrendous, to the point where it's easy to see why they went back and redrew the ponies' core designs starting in season 2. The various ways they try to express emotions at awkward angles gave birth to some ungodly abominations. It's also interesting to note that while this episode went out of its way to make the point that Pinkie's nonsense actually follows an internal Pinkie Pie Logic that makes sense if you look at it from her point of view... this entire concept was dropped in later seasons in favor of her shrieking like a maniac and being "lolrandom" at any and all times (unless it's an episode focused on her).
Feeling Pinkie Keen: The gift of hindsight has revealed the strange fact that there isn't another single episode in the entire franchise quite like this one. Even among Pinkie Pie episodes, the amount of random bullcrap and canon-shattering nonsense throughout the episode is quite extraordinary. From hovering wheelbarrows and moving vans (unless anything strapped to a Pegasus can fly as well, which is never demonstrated again) to spontaneously generating basement supercomputers, this episode doesn't give a good goddamn about its setting or the structure laid out by the rest of Season 1, and it only looks even further out of left field when compared to later seasons. It's also the only episode of the series to lean on Loony-Tunes style physical violence, and features Twilight Sparkle at her most utterly dickish. It doesn't contain a single trace of any of the established logic or themes seen in the rest of the franchise as a whole. Which, perhaps, is a stroke of genius on the writer's part, since the acceptance of observable nonsense is the final moral of the story.
Overall so far Season 1 is... nostalgic, but I honestly prefer later seasons. Even the voice acting back then felt more like "acting" and less natural than it has become as the performers properly felt out their given roles. Looking back is a lot of fun regardless, though.
Feeling Pinkie Keen: Running into Dave Polsky's love of Loony-Tunes references headfirst.
I believe this is called 'Early Instalment Weirdness' by Tv Tropes, and is the result of people not really getting a good grip on what they're making until awhile into it. This was before a lot of things were properly established and people got a hang on what they were doing.
While I like the first season for creating characters who would become better used later on, I'm not too big a fan of how it was on its own. For example, while I like Trixie a lot, I really didn't like 'Boast Busters' for how strangely written it was, especially when it came to who should have been blamed for what, and Rainbow Dash, my current favourite of the Mane Six, was really kind of jerk the whole season. The only season 1 episode that I truly enjoyed on its own was 'A Dog and Pony Show' for just how awesome Rarity was in that one.
For the most part though, I'd say that the show started to really get good with Season 2, with Discord kicking off the season as a better villain than Nightmare Moon was in her debut, and with a string of good episodes following suite, including personal favourites like 'Hurricane Fluttershy', 'Lesson Zero', 'Mmmystery on the Friendship Express', 'Hearth's Warming Eve' and 'Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000'. Of course, there was 'Mysterious Mare-Do-Well' that wasn't all that good, and 'A Canterlot Wedding' that I personally wasn't a big fan of, but those episodes were still not enough to curb my enjoyment of the season or the ones that came after.
Thanks for the nostalgia trip,
Samurai JackDrag