Alright, I Did It

   Doctors, specifically, of the orthodontic variety. I had my sole wisdom tooth taken out. I spent yesterday recuperating: lying down, eating no solids, icing my mouth every twenty minutes. I will spend today doing much the same thing. It was in this environment I decided that I had to watch Less Derp-y Derpy Last Roundup. I had to see for myself. What would you do? So when the episode came onto rotation, I decided why not. So I buckled myself down, and I watched the episode...

   And it was awesome. Seriously, still just as entertaining as all-get-out. I watched it something like 12, 13 times in a row. No hyperbole. Watching and re-watching for hours and hours until my bladder almost gave out. What else was there to do? I think that I'll actually be able to make it through a year of Lion King. Seriously. It didn't get old or anything.

   When you watch something like that enough, you begin to see the reasoning behind why the producers did what they did. I discovered that Derpy/Ditzy (?)'s role in the story is somewhat principal to the lesson of the episode. Instead of running away from your problems, run to your friends. Other themes I noticed:

1. Food- Not only is there cake and a lot of cherries, food is discussed a lot. Popcorn and peanuts and taffy and sarsaparilla and snackiness in general. Pinkie uses the word "pickles" as an interjection, Applejack does the same thing with "nuts," Pinkie's favorite funniest three words all involve food, Applejack doesn't come to breakfast, the phrase "spill the beans" is used a few times. Speaking of...
2. Cliches- the ponies for whatever reason use a lot of cliches in this episode. Example: in the I Love Lucy conveyor belt homage scene, it should have been "easy as cherry pie." But it wasn't (hence the homage.) After that, they decide that they "seem to be striking out" on getting A.J. to spill the beans, they decide it's because they're "playing too nice," that "desperate times do call for desperate measures," so they "call in the big guns." That's all contiguous in one continuous dialogue, by the way. Yeah.
3. Anxiousness- kind of hard to miss out on after you've been lying down in front of the television for over five hours doing nothing but drinking fluids. You could say I was pretty jittery by the end of it. I peed for a solid minute when my mare-a-thon was over. Likewise there's a lot of jitteriness within the episode? Applejack is anxious to get the heck out of Dodge, Pinkie is anxious to hit the head (!).
4. Have fun!- Both Pinkie Pie and Cherry Jubilee use this exact phrase as a reminder to have fun. Ms. Jubilee makes a big deal of it, so it kind of calls attention to itself.
5. Economy- the mayor is obsessed with money, mentioning it specifically in three of her four lines (three lines if you don't count the ponies cheering as splitting her first line.) During the big chase at the end, Applejack will give the cart pullers double pay to outrun the the others, the others'll give them triple pay to slow down, A.J.'ll give them quadruple pay to leave them in the dust.

   Also, where the heck is Spike in all of this? He appears a grand total of "the theme song" times.