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Sleepless in Ponyville (December 8th 2012, 22 minutes)

Summary: Scootaloo will do anything to impress Rainbow Dash, but does that include facing her nightmares?

Title pun on Sleepless in Seattle, which thankfully has nothing to do with this episode beyond the title.

Checkers with little horseshoe markers. Cute.

Standard pup tents. You can't get these anymore unless you pick them up custom, as dome tents and their variants have taken over completely. They're a simplification of the Anglo-Saxon ridge tent that commonly had a separate ridge pole rather than relying completely on canvas tension.

And as silly as it seems, I've actually seen something very close to Rarity's tent in real life. It's a center pole marque tent, using inflatable 'poles'. It was amusing, but no-where near as stable as it needed to be, and the stupid inflator pump had to be running constantly to keep it up. And while I've seen tents with second 'floors' they were more like hammock nets for storage. Except for one fellow who actually had wood plank flooring, but that thing had steel cable guylines, six-foot long stakes, and left the concept of 'tent' a long time ago.

Ponies really can't help but put that spiral decoration on *everything* can't they?

Here the horseshoes are very specifically called out and visible.

Heya Luna!

Scotaloo may not be able to fly, but she can still do cloudwalking and the like.

At what point did Sweetie Bell lose the ability to sing?

The Headless Horse. Of course being a homage to the Headless Horseman. The Headless Horseman's been running around in mythology for a very long time, with both Celtic and Germanic versions being popular. The oldest version I've run into is the Headless Huntsman, a variant of the Wild Hunt.

So Luna is a dreamwalker. She speaks of it being her 'duty', so likely this isn't a natural ability but a specially researched spell. This opens up a lot of questions about range and usage.

In this case, Scootaloo is again using 'Horse' as a specific thing, as she uses the term 'Pony' in her description as referring to the Headless Horse's victims, but insists on using the term horse when referring to the monster in every other way.

Okay, fascinating. The rainbows are running like water. Not just in appearance, but blending in with the actual waterfalls. But the color dissipates after some distance so that the rivers after the rainbowfalls don't pick it up. So whatever the pigment is, it vanishes once it passes a point of dilution. In which case, Zap Apples may be a case of picking up this dilute pigment from the soil and concentrating it again, much like how Hydrangea flowers change color based on soil conditions.