Rainbow Roadtrip Review · 4:53pm Jun 29th, 2019
This was a fun little thing.
First comment is on the art style. Maybe it's only because it's been a couple since I've seen the movie, but this art style didn't seem quite the same, it seemed like a combination of the traditional Flash the show uses with the movie's engine. I don't mean that as a bad thing, I liked it, it seemed like an evolution of the art style we've gotten used to instead of just a jump forward (not that I disliked the movie's style, it was good too).
This felt kinda like a Gen 1 adventure, speaking as someone who wasn't into Gen 1. The ponies go on a roadtrip to a new land, find an area with an unusual problem that needs their help, and they help. It's fairly obvious this isn't on the up-and-up right away, but you're not sure if it's a villain trap and if it is then who, or what's going on. It kept me interested as the story unfolded for the first third. There were definite shades of Starlight's cult village, but things played out differently, and with this show's track record it was hard to tell if the town would turn out to be evil or working for a villain or whatever.
Overall story was fine, was neat how they started to bring color back to the town bit by bit, I appreciate it wasn't a last-second deus ex machina, though there was. The intro song was fine, the mayor's song was awful, last song was fine. Ending was FEELS CENTRAL, it got me, and you know what I mean if you've seen it. Humor was solid throughout, lots of funny and cute moments.
And lastly, gotta be honest - I felt like I liked this better than the actual *movie*. The new characters being introduced felt organic and natural, and they got time to show their personalities instead of just forced song numbers, the Mane 6 got time to shine and do things of substance, we were dealing with a type of magic the show has never had before and we couldn't be fully sure who or what caused it. Yeah, this was basically an hour-long episode, but it was a very good episode, and it didn't feel padded or dragged to fill its run time.
Overall, good stuff.
It was decent but I don't think it needed to be a 90 minute special.
5081411
It was 60 minutes
5081411
Yeah, agreed. I think they could have done it as an hour just fine.
I’m normally one of the more positive voices (I absolutely love the movie!), but this was very middle of the road for me.
5081454
People can complain about the movie all they want but at least it was entertaining. It felt like they were making use of every minute they had and it was full of catchy and memorable songs. In this special, it felt like they were struggling to fill the run time and we only got 2 songs with the first being a very dull exposition song.
I really don't understand why they thought this story needed the extra run time when it would have benefited from being only as long as Best Gift Ever and even then I don't really think this story was interesting enough to warrant being even that long.
5081478
We also had an intro song.
As someone who does like Gen 1, this was really more of a Gen 3 adventure...
5081478 Well from what I hear, this was them trying to salvage their plans for a sequel to the 2017 movie, which explains the art style. But if I didn't know that going into this, I would've never believed it was at all meant to be connected to the movie or even a stand alone sequel.