YMMV / My Little Pony Tales S 1 E 11 The Impractical Joker

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Starlight and Melody address Patch by name while they're disguised as martians, prompting Patch to ask how they know her name. They explain that they've been observing her all this time, and as a result, they know she's the smartest pony in Ponyland. Was this all part of their plan, or did they slip up by revealing their knowledge of her name and have to do damage control?
• Awesome Music: "Practical Jokes". In addition to containing fairly creative rhyming, it's catchy, bouncy, and upbeat.
• Franchise Original Sin: "28 Pranks Later" was, to say the least, not one of FiM's greatest offerings. The plot concerns Rainbow Dash going on a pranking spree against Ponyville, only for them to eventually retaliate by feigning a zombie apocalypse. The plot of this episode is quite similar, but why it works here but not there is that Patch doesn't come off as thoughtless and insensitive to the same extent Rainbow Dash does, since Rainbow's friends stage an intervention about the problem but Rainbow refuses to back down. There's also the fact that neither Rainbow Dash nor Pinkie Pie take issue with pranking Fluttershy even though it was previously established that they won't prank her because she's too sensitive to handle it. On the side of the prankster's victims getting revenge, Patch only thinks the aliens want to harvest her brain for a few moments before the prank is revealed, while Rainbow spends a significantly longer amount of time thinking she's turned all of Ponyville's inhabitants into zombies, so the prank reeks of Karmic Overkill much more in that episode than in this one.
• Fridge Brilliance: During Patch's song, Teddy is one of the ponies to fall victim to one of her pranks. Later, Teddy turns out to have helped the girls with their prank to get Patch back.
• Harsher in Hindsight: During Patch's song, she steals Bon Bon's and Clover's burgers and drinks. So-called "prank videos" on YouTube in the The New '10s would later be subject to scrutiny for containing unacceptable behavior dismissed as, "it's just a prank", and sometimes this behavior would be eating someone else's food.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The episode's title isn't at all far off from that of a later series.
  • The plot of a prankster pony getting a taste of their own medicine would later be used in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "28 Pranks Later".

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