This episode has a remarkably similar premise to “Princess Shooting Stars,” which isn’t great—you don’t want to be recycling plots in your first season. That said, the show does go in a different angle with it.
After the success of their “four-fruitdom celebration,” each of the four royal families invite the others to their respective kingdoms for a cultural festival. The only issue? The invitations are all for the same day. The four princesses decide the way to go is to combine the four celebrations into one, and they set out to demonstrate that to their families.
Amusingly, even though both episodes are about how everyone can come together and celebrate, the girls have the exact opposite problem here as they did in “Princess Shooting Stars.” In the previous episode, they had different ideas for how to plan their celebration, and when their mild disagreement caused a surprising amount of chaos, they came to the sunshiny “everybody wins!” conclusion of combining all their ideas into one. Here, that’s their move from the start, but they go ridiculously too far with it. For instance, when it comes to feasting, they don’t present a signature dish from each fruitdom. No, they combine flavors/ingredients from four entirely different dishes into a single culinary monstrosity.
Even though all their ideas here are absurd in how wrong they are, I appreciate the message that not everything should be mashed together, that there’s value in specificity and each group having their own traditions. It just takes an erupting “chocolate lava pot roast” for them to realize that.
A couple more adult voice actors to report. Penny’s abuela is voiced by the one and only Rita Moreno, and when I went to IMDb to confirm that, I discovered that Rita’s mom is voiced by Jenna Ushkowitz, who I first saw as Tina on Glee. This is neat, but put together with Andrew Rannells, it’s even more unacceptable that the adults never join in on any of the songs.
Because this episode is all about the princesses showing off their frankensteined festival ideas to their families, it’s another one where Rannells’s King Barton is present a lot but doesn’t really do much. Like the other monarchs, he’s there mainly to react. I smiled when he nearly faints at the sight of the chocolate lava pot roast. And at the start of the episode, when he’s upset that the other monarchs turned down his invitation, there’s an amusing shot of him sobbing into a mixing bowl as Bea explains, “Pop’s feelings are so hurt, he’s making his famous Forlorn French Toast.”
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