Pinkie Pie(s): FUN!!!
Written by Dave Polsky
Pinkie Pie is hanging out with Twilight in the town square when she sees Rarity in a new outfit she's designed. Disappointed that she missed out on seeing the garment come together, Pinkie has the unsettling realization that she just doesn't have enough time to hang out with all her best friends, and will have to miss out on fun with them. She nevertheless tries to both hang out with Rainbow Dash at the swimming hole and help Applejack put up a new barn at Sweet Apple Acres, until Twilight comments:
Thus, Pinkie remembers the legendary Mirror Pond (also called the Mirror Pool), which is said to create a magical clone of anypony who recites a magic rhyme and gazes into its depths. She stumbles upon the pond in an underground cavern deep in the Everfree Forest, and soon finds herself face-to-face with an exact duplicate of herself who's ready and eager to have fun—perhaps a little too eager. As she heads off to play with Rainbow Dash, Pinkie instructs her clone to go to Sweet Apple Acres, so the clone can tell her all about Applejack's day.
At the swimming hole, Pinkie finds that Rainbow Dash is tuckered out from a long morning of cloud-wrangling and would rather relax on the shore, so she swims quietly so as to not disturb her friend. The clone, meanwhile, is sidetracked on her way to Applejack's when Fluttershy invites her to a tea party with her woodland friends. Now the clone becomes torn between which friend to spend time with, and rushes back to Pinkie for advice. The solution seems simple enough: make more clones so they can have more fun! Unfortunately, the clones get too carried away and keep copying themselves until there are dozens of Pinkie Pies running around Ponyville.
It dawns on Pinkie that her clones don't share her consideration for her friends, and she watches in horror as they disrupt Rainbow Dash's rest and knock down Applejack's unfinished barn in their attempts to have "fun". Soon a mob of angry ponies swamp Twilight's library to demand a solution to this infestation of Pinkie Pies. Twilight and Spike find a book hidden away in the library containing a spell that will send the clones back into the Mirror Pond. Of course, there's a catch: the spell doesn't just work on clones so if she's not careful, Twilight could banish the real Pinkie into the pond by mistake. With all these Pinkies running around acting weird, not even the original Pinkie is sure who the real one is anymore.
Fortunately, inspiration strikes when Pinkie suggests that Twilight give an unfun test to root out the clones; after all, only the real Pinkie would be willing to do the most boring task if it means staying with her friends. Taking this to heart, Twilight and co. herd the many, many Pinkie Pies to town hall for the test: watching paint dry! Sure enough, the Pinkie clones get distracted one by one and are zapped back into the Mirror Pond until only one remains: the original Pinkie Pie, who has definitely learned her lesson; don't try too hard to be there for all her friends and true friends will be willing to accept she can't be everywhere at once. After a long day of excitement — and blocking up the entrance to the Mirror Pond — the only thing Pinkie wants to do now is take a nap.
Tropes:
- Accidental Misnaming: The Pinkie clones had a hard time remembering Applejack and Fluttershy's names. The real Pinkie had to quiz them.
- Ambiguous Clone Ending: Played With. After Twilight zaps away all the clones in the room and only the original Pinkie remains, at first she shouts joyfully "I'm me! I'm me! I'm me!", but then she suddenly stops and asks herself "Or am I?", nervously examines her own face and concludes: "Yeah, I'm pretty sure I am".
- An Aesop:
- Don't try to spread yourself thinly and do everything at once.
- Concerning Pinkie's identity crisis near the climax: You are one-of-a-kind, there's literally no one entirely like you.
- Art Shift: As explained below, for a split second Pinkie is drawn like a G3 pony.
- Barn Raising: One of the many things that was ruined by the Pinkie clones in this episode.
- Batman Gambit: Pinkie and Twilight reason the clones care too much about fun to do boring things even if it means being banished forever while the real Pinkie wouldn't stoop to such lows, so they arrange a paint-watching test that pushes them to the limits only the genuine article can muster.
- Body Horror: One of the Pinkie clones briefly sprouts fingers from her hoof. Another Pinkie clone rearranges her face to look like a G3 pony (namely, the G3 pony named Pinkie Pie).
- Body Wipe: Pinkie Pie trotting toward the lens to end the act.
- Bookcase Passage: The book that Twilight learns of the magic of the pool in is hidden in a secret compartment at the back of a library shelf, behind a door with a horseshoe-shaped latch. The reason isn't explained, but considering the havoc caused by the pool, it must have been for good reason.
- Brick Joke: The frog that Twilight accidentally morphed into an orange serves as a distraction for several of the Pinkie clones.
- Broken Record: "FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN!"
- By Wall That Is Holey: A Pinkie clone is spared being smashed because it's dancing exactly where the window of a wall fell.
- The Cameo:
- Fancypants appears for a sight gag. What he's doing in Ponyville in the first place, we have no idea.
- Tank the tortoise joins Rainbow Dash in the tree-shelter from the Pinkie-madness.
- Cassandra Truth:
- Rainbow Dash doesn't believe Pinkie when told outright that she created a clone of herself.
- Averted later on when Pinkie realizes her friends won't believe her if she says she's the real one, so she doesn't bother. At the same time, Twilight brushes off Spike's questioning if the depressed Pinkie surrounded by her energetic clones is in fact the original, claiming that she wouldn't sit still for that long.
- Clone Angst: Inverted; the copies of Pinkie are busy having fun while the original Pinkie suffers an existential crisis.
- Clone Degeneration: Once there's more than one clone, most of which are clones of clones, they start acting even crazier and less like individuals. Then again, so does the first clone at that point. Further Flanderization or Conservation of Competence?
- Continuity Nod:
- Pinkie's Grandma/Nana gets mentioned again.
- This isn't the first time that Pinkie has shown an unusual level of familiarity with the inhabitants of the Everfree Forest.
- "Now off to double my fun!"
- Rainbow reads a Daring Do book while sunbathing, and brings Tank the Tortoise along with her to the tree-shelter.
- Two (and a possible third) from "Party of One":
- Pinkie tires herself out at the end of the Cold Opening again.
- Rainbow Dash is wearing a real wristwatch on her hoof this time.
- The animals invite Fluttershy and her friends into their home for a while. It's a cave that's cozy enough to be a house. Perhaps Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash weren't making all of that up...
- Two from "Lesson Zero":
- The Apple family is still working on the new barn.
- Fluttershy's bear makes an appearance at the tea party picnic.
- Rarity is now designing Haute Couture ensembles.
- Twilight is once again performing magic on apples.
- Contrived Coincidence: The book on the Mirror Pool found in the secret compartment found behind a stack of books by Spike was awfully convenient given the timing. It also leads one to wonder how it was never noticed before considering how many times that library must have undergone cleaning and re-shelving by its resident.
- Cute, but Cacophonic: The Pinkie Clones. "Fun! Fun! Fun! Fun!"
- Door-Closes Ending: Once Pinkie has been worn out and falls asleep, the Mane Five chuckle at this and Twilight closes the door to Sugarcube Corner, ending the episode.
- Expendable Clone: Twilight is alarmingly cavalier about banishing the Pinkie Pie clones and it made worse with the effects of the spell. Justified, when you think of Pinkie's clones more as magical manifestations than real living ponies;
Word of God states
this was their intention, that the clones were converted back into energy when zapped, and that they were honestly surprised that fans were looking any further into it. - Face Plant: Happens to Pinkie when she falls down the tunnel to the Mirror Pond.
- Fantastic Aesop: Remember: pleasing all your friends can be hard, but don't clone yourself so you can spend time with all of them at once. That's gonna cause problems.
- Flanderization: Deconstructed; Pinkie's mass-produced clones exaggerate the "FUN!" aspect of the original, which irritates the real Pinkie's friends to no end. There are more facets to her personality than 'FUN!' because she is the real deal, and this ensures that her friends aren't irritated by her personally. Until this episode, the real Pinkie was being Flanderized into an Innocently Insensitive party pony, though not nearly to the extent of her clones by comparison. This, as a result, becomes a good wake-up call for the real Pinkie about taking her idea of fun too far.
- Forced Transformation: Twilight accidentally transforms a bird and frog into half-orange creatures as a result of Pinkie messing up her aim while practicing the apple to orange spell.
- Forgot Flanders Could Do That: In-Universe, Spike, Twilight Sparkle, and Rainbow Dash all forget that the real Pinkie Pie sometimes has serious moments, which keeps them from recognizing the mopey Pinkie "poking at the ground making frowny faces" as the original.
- Fourth-Wall Observer: When exiting the underground lake for the first time, the first Pinkie Pie clone stares directly into the camera, albeit from a distance.
- Funny Background Event:
- Too many to list. Just look around whenever the clones are together and you're bound to spot at least one.
- There's also one in the beginning of the episode where a pink pony is sitting by herself looking angry while shifting her eyes, implying that she was on a date and the other pony didn't show up.
- Fun Personified: The clones are literally made of pinkie energy; i.e. FUN!. It's the only trait of the original they copied.
- Furry Reminder: Fluttershy has hay juice on her picnic.
- Gasp!: The Pinkies' reaction to learning that their test is watching paint dry.
- Gender-Blender Name: Played with: the first copy of Pinkie accidentally calls Applejack "Applejohn".
- Genre Blind: Spike is the only one to realize that the Pinkie Pie who is stressed out, depressed, and filled with self-doubt is the real one. Justified, as Twilight and the others are afraid to banish the real Pinkie by mistake, and can't afford to jump to conclusions because one Pinkie acts differently from the others.
- A Good, Old-Fashioned Paint Watching: How they figure out which Pinkie is the real one because only the real one could stand such a thing if it meant staying with her friends.
- Head Desk: Pinkie pounds her head on a table as full realization of what she's done sinks in.
- Heroic BSoD: Pinkie doubts that she herself is the real one when the other Pinkies start running amok.
- Hidden Depths: A plot point overlapping with Imposter Forgot One Detail: the clone Pinkies can easily be distinguished from the real one by the fact they don't have these.
- High-Class Gloves: Or at least the equine equivalent are part of Rarity's new outfit during the teaser.
- Hilarity Ensues: While Hilarity does ensue, so does a lot of emotion.
- I Am Spartacus: All of the Pinkie clones claim to be the original Pinkie.
- Idea Bulb: A variant—Pinkie's head "ticks" and then rings like an alarm clock as the realization of the Mirror Pond comes to mind, following a scene involving her stopwatch.
- Imposter Forgot One Detail: It's more like Imposter Only Remembered One Detail. The duplicates only got Pinkie's personality, and wouldn't have fooled any of her friends if they had bothered to try talking. They are exaggerated, fun-loving versions of the real Pinkie Pie and don't have Pinkie's memories (Pinkie has to teach them her friends' names) or the same love she has for her friends.
- Inflating Body Gag: A rather grotesque version. When Twilight casts her spell to send the Pinkie clones away, it makes the clones inflate until they pop. The resulting cloud of magic energy flies back to the Mirror Pool.
- It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: Pinkie cloning herself so she could spend time with all her friends at once.
- Just Eat Gilligan: The last act of the episode could've been circumvented had anyone realized that the real Pinkie was the sad one.
- Lack of Empathy: This is what makes Pinkie's clones different from the original. She has Empathy, and other things, in addition to FUN! This is why she slows down her dive and splashes quietly out of consideration for Rainbow Dash.
- Lampshade Hanging: Rainbow Dash wonders how Pinkie is able to slow down her dive so she splashes quietly.
- Magic Mirror: A pond that serves as one is Pinkie's method of choice for self-cloning.
- May It Never Happen Again: Pinkie Pie discovers the Mirror Pool and uses it to clone herself a bunch of times so she can hang out with all her friends at once, but the clones start causing trouble around Ponyville and become impossible to tell apart from the real Pinkie Pie. After Twilight has gotten rid of all the clones and determined which Pinkie is the real one, the entrance to the Mirror Pool is sealed off with a giant boulder.
- Me's a Crowd: Pinkie creates clones of herself so they can tell her about the fun she's missing. It quickly gets out of hand.
- Mind Screw: When Pinkie enters the mirror pool, she becomes the first clone. The real Pinkie was somehow standing on the bank all along, as if the pool were a gateway to a mirror world. The second cloning (going from two Pinkies to four) is similarly mind-bending to watch, due to the ambiguous camera angle.note
- Mirror Routine: One of the Pinkie clones imitates Twilight's motions as she speaks to the real Pinkie.
- Mundane Made Awesome: Inverted with paint watching; the point is to force the pinkies do something mind rendingly boring to weed out the real one. Spike does a Pass the Popcorn bit, but eats it all before anything exciting happens.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Uttered by Pinkie after she sees her clones ruining her friends' day.
- Mythology Gag:
- The use of a magic mirror pond to create clones is similar to the idea of the G1 comics' baby ponies being "born" from adult ponies who would look into a magic mirror.
- Also, a face shown by one duplicate Pinkie Pie may bring some memories of the series before this one.note
- Never Say "Die": This is a zigzag. Word of God states that clones are not real people but Empty Shells that only known about FUN! Twilight's spell is specifically stated to send Pinkie Pie's clones "back where they came from", and describes the possibility of using this on the real Pinkie as "sending her back", and Pinkie says "goes back into the pond". However, since the clones never existed inside the pond before Pinkie created them Twilight is basically killing them by sending them back to nonexistence. Also Pinkie Pie doesn't elaborate when she says "What if I don't pass? What if I'm not the real Pinkie Pie?" Since the real Pinkie Pie is not made of magical energy, it's unknown what the spell would do to her.
- Never Trust a Trailer: See Mythology Gag above.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Pinkie's plan of being in multiple places at once by cloning herself goes awry when the Pinkie clones get the same idea, resulting in an army of extremely annoying Pinkies.
- Oh, My Gods!: "What in the name of pink?"
- Only Sane Man: The original Pinkie quickly realizes what trouble her clones are making and tries to be their voice of reason.note
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: You know things have gotten out of hand when the real Pinkie is identifiable as the somber one.
- Painting the Medium: The "walls" closing on clone!Pinkie as the screen zooms in on her face.
- Pass the Popcorn: Spike does this for the paint-drying. Smash fade to him bored out of his mind and almost out of popcorn.
- Planimal: When Pinkie distracts Twilight while the latter practicing a spell to turn an apple into an orange, the off-target magic transforms a frog into a frog-legged orange with a wide slice for a mouth and passing bird into a winged orange.
- "Pop!" Goes the Human: A variation. The Pinkie clones inflate when Twilight zaps them, but implode into magical energy that flies back into the Mirror Pond, rather than exploding.
- Rhetorical Question Blunder: Fluttershy after the first Pinkie clone freaks out and runs off.
- Rule of Fun: The idea of somepony having fun without her is what drives Pinkie Pie to find the Mirror Pond and make copies of herself. Even if she couldn't be there when her friends were having fun, at least somePinkie could.
- Self-Deprecation: As featured in the season 3 promo:Pinkie Pie: Betcha can't make a face crazier than THIS!!!
[Pinkie Pie makes a G3 pony face before getting blasted by Twilight] - Send in the Clones: Pinkie wanted one of herself for each friend so she didn't miss anything.
- Serious Business: Pinkie panics that there is fun being had that she's not able to be a part of.
- Ship Tease: Before the mob of Pinkie clones storms through the street between their houses, there's a brief shot of Golden Harvest and Noteworthy looking at each other across the street from their bedroom windows. Golden Harvest waves, and Noteworthy smiles back excitedly.
- Shout-Out:
- One of the clone Pinkie Pies in the background at the lake appears to be doing the Gangnam Style dance as her front hooves are overlapped as if they were holding the reins of a horse. Bonus points in that being a pony, she is a horse!
- One of the Pinkie clones that just barely survives the front of the barn falling on her, thanks to her standing where the window would be, is a shout-out to Buster Keaton's most infamous stunt.
- The style and sound of the Pinkies shouting "FUN! FUN! FUN!" is extremely similar to the "MINE! MINE! MINE!" shouting of the seagulls of Finding Nemo.
- Pinkie's cloning herself as a means to have more fun, only to have her clones become exaggerated versions of herself that she can't control, mirrors the Duplicator arc in Calvin and Hobbes.
- Smoking Barrel Blowout: After zapping all but two of the Pinkie Pies, Twilight's horn overheats and emits smoke, which she blows out.
- Sorcerer's Apprentice Plot: Pinkie creates one duplicate to help herself and makes two more when one is not enough and then it spins out of control into an unstoppable army of annoying Pinkies that resident wizard Twilight has to fix.
- Spot the Imposter: As suggested by the real Pinkie Pie, Twilight forces all the Pinkies to watch paint dry, reasoning that the real one would sit through it all for her friends.
- Stock Footage: Sharp-eyed viewers may notice the Pinkie clones recycling chunks of animation from earlier episodes.
- Sudden Anatomy: By blowing into one front hoof, Pinkie Pie (one of them, at least) can sprout fingers from her other front hoof.
- Summation Gathering: Twilight tells all the Pinkie Pies in the auditorium of the town hall "I suppose you're all wondering why I've gathered you here today."
- Tail Slap: Rainbow Dash uses her tail to manage clouds.
- Take That!: The entire episode is a satire on Flanderization. The clone Pinkies only have one trait, which is played as an Exaggerated Trope, and the townsponies are as annoyed by it as the audience would be.
- Talking to Themself: Pinkie playfully chastises herself for it while walking to the Mirror Pool for the first time. Then she wonders if talking to her clone counts as the same.
- Tears of Remorse: Pinkie gets teary-eyed as she sees her clones tormenting her poor friends and realizes it's all her fault.
- Tome of Eldritch Lore: Subverted; Spike discovers a book hidden away in a secret compartment, as if it were dangerous. It turns out to be a local-legends-guidebook.
- Toon Physics:
- Pinkie and her clones, all over the place. Unusually, somepony notices, when Pinkie pauses in midair and lowers herself gently into a lake from a jump. (notably, this would not be a feat at all for almost two thirds of the local population, including the wing-equipped pegasi and the levitation-capable unicorns. Pinkie, however, is of the one pony subset that is NOT supposed to be able to fly.)
Rainbow Dash: How'd you do that...?- Applejack's new barn gets in on the action as well. When the Pinkies swarm the site and makes the Apples release the rope holding the broad side, the other sides fall to the ground, leaving the central crossbeam hanging in the air for a few seconds before it falls too.
- Trailers Always Spoil: The G3 pony face joke was inserted by storyboardist Sabrina Alberghetti, something that she stated she had been trying to inject and the episode made for the perfect opportunity. Only for the Hub preview ads for Season 3 to pull that scene out of context.
- Two-Timer Date: Trying to avoid this is the reason why all this happens in the first place; two Pinkies can be at both places.
- Unreveal Angle: While the photos of Applejack and Fluttershy that Pinkie shows to the clones are shown, the third picture of herself is only shown from behind and we never get to see it onscreen.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Everypony seems more annoyed or intimidated than shocked by the presence of several dozen Pinkie Pies. The first time Rainbow Dash sees one duplicate, she shrugs it off. Probably overlaps with Weirdness Censor: Everypony is used to Pinkie doing impossible things...
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Twilight's suggestion is what inspired Pinkie to pump off to Mirror Pond.
- Walk Into Camera Obstruction: Pinkie's body fills the screen when she and her clones leave the Mirror Pool.
- We Need a Distraction: When all but two Pinkies have been eliminated by the paint-watching test and neither shows any signs of cracking any time soon, Rainbow Dash can't stand it any longer and yells, "Somepony's making balloon animals!"Pinkie Clone: What? Where? (gets zapped)
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Some of the Pinkie clones can talk, the ones who can't talk can still understand complex speech, they're fully capable of learning (particularly the first one that was around longer than the rest) and even feel emotions (again, the first one was devastated that she was missing "fun" events and the last one to be zapped looked notably scared), but the ponies don't even think twice about zapping them into oblivion.
