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| Well, this isn't disturbing at all... |
S8E18: "Yakity-Sax"
25 Aug 2018 (previewed by Discovery Family 20 Jul 2018)
My original rating: ★★
IMDb score: 5.3
Thoughts: This ep was not in fact hated by everyone from the start. But it had a negative reception overall, sometimes very negative – and if anything it's got worse over time. A few nice touches, such as AJ's callback to "Horse Play". The way Pinkamena gradually gets greyer and greyer. I quite like the Pinkie Pie Appreciation Party, too. But. But. Here we have Pinkie valuing a hobby we've never seen before over her friends. Twilight making a mess of wording the "you're bad at this". Pinkie deciding the best response is to run away to Yakyakistan, saying that without the yovidaphone her life has no meaning. The Manes being unutterably thick about how they need to talk to Maud. And the rotten cherry on the whole stinking mess of a cake, the appalling moral. "Sod everyone else, Pinkie, your personal obsession beats their welfare any day!" So: don't be honest with your friends when they're keeping a whole town awake, just encourage them to annoy everyone even more! Besides, there is a canon silence spell ("Amending Fences") which Twi doesn't even mention. Use that, for Celestia's sake! There's actually a fun episode somewhere in this basic premise. The teeny, tiny snag? This ain't it.
Choice quote: Pinkie Pie: "Those apple turnovers aren't gonna apple themselves!"
New rating: ★
And breathe. Next time it'll be "Road to Friendship", which isn't a perfect episode by any means but is on another level to this. It's one of Josh Haber's most popular eps, helped by the chemistry of its principal characters and a very catchy song. I liked it a good deal in 2018, and I hope I'll like it a good deal again this year!
I definitely hated this one from the start! :V and it just gets worse the more you think about it
ReplyDeleteNow here's a truly fascinating episode. How does something like this get created? The mind truly boggles at the idea that a writer wrote it, and afterwards, multiple people who calls themselves "directors" and "producers" looked at it and deemed it a good story.
ReplyDeleteNow, obviously, I don't know anything about the actual production history of this episode, but somehow it has always felt like a story that got ruined by rewrites.
It's easy for me to imagine an earlier version of the script where Pinkie's yovidaphone playing is just a source of silght annoyance rather than the life-ruining reign of terror it is in the final episode. But when the writer sent this script to their boss, it came back with a note:
"Yeah, it's pretty good, but the first act needs more jokes."
And then they added more jokes. Jokes that ruined the moral.
All this is pure guesswork, of course. Maybe, uh... Ghost Mike has the inside scoop? (hint, hint)
Ugh, this was just terrible from start to finish.
ReplyDeleteI think I gave the episode a 1/10 the first time around, but in hindsight, I think that was far too generous of me. Yakity Sax is just flat out awful.
ReplyDeleteAs in, "-10/10 (a.k.a. spectacularly negative)" awful.
Hell, as in, "one of the worst ever episodes of MLP G4" awful!
oof, I saw that low rating coming. I had recently seen this ep criticised elsewhere too
ReplyDeletehonestly, this is a Wild Manes style ep in a show that has lore, so of course it's not gonna work for the rewatch.
but, unlike Wild Manes (which I am now obsessed with if you couldn't tell :P ) it is also fairly unappealing in general. I will stick with giving it a 2-star though because of how relatable the idea of a friend taking up a horrible hobby is
There are people in Hollywood who are nearly completely disconnected from normal society and have some truly awful personality disorders. Some of those people go to therapy. Others become screenwriters.
ReplyDelete