‘Phineas And Ferb' Creators Talk The Show's Longevity, TikTok Trends & Disney Channel Revival: ‘It May Be Our Best Season Ever'
'Phineas and Ferb'
Dan Povenmire and Jeff 'Swampy Marsh' know what they're gonna do this summer, and that's celebrate the return of their massive Disney Channel hit — Phineas and Ferb.
If you recall, the Mouse Handed-branded network picked the show back in 2023 up for an additional two seasons (comprising a total of 40 episodes) as part of Povenmire's overall creative deal with Disney Branded Television.
And you better believe Disney is pulling out all the promotional stops with a branded ice cream truck roaming Los Angeles, a "Platypus Cam" at the San Diego Zoo, and a Porta(l) potty spy lair activation at the Van Warped Tour in Washington, D.C.
When the fifth season debuts this Thursday — June 5 — at 8:00 p.m. ET, nearly ten years will have passed since the animated classic went off the air, though fans did get a fresh fix in 2020 with the original feature film, Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension. Even more staggering is the fact that the animated series is just two years away from celebrating its 20th anniversary.
'God, I'm old,' quips Marsh on a Zoom call with his fellow co-creator.
But as the old saying goes, 'age is just a number,' and if Phineas and Ferb has taught us anything, it's to never lose touch with our sense of childlike wonder and imagination…
Weiss: What was the journey of bringing the show back for two additional seasons?
Povenmire: They've been making murmurings about wanting more for quite a while. The movie in 2020 did really well for them. Every so often, somebody would call and say, 'Hey, if we did more Phineas and Ferb, would you guys be on board?' And we were like, 'Yeah!' Then they called us and we thought it was for another movie or special. They said, 'Would you guys be interested in making 40 more episodes?' And we were like, "Um…sure. That sounds like fun." That's like getting the band back together. We put together a writers team with a lot of people from the original show and a lot of young writers who grew up on the show … We're just having the best time. We were a little worried that we were going to get into the writers' room and people would pitch stuff we already did, and it hasn't been that at all. They're pitching wonderful, new, fresh ideas. It's like, 'Oh my God! Why did we never try to do something like this before?!'
Marsh: [jokingly] We just brought in the young writers so that we had somebody to ridicule and yet, here they are, writing good stories.
Weiss: That's really cool you're now working alongside people who were inspired to become creatives because of your show. What's that experience like?
Povenmire: They're older than I was expecting them to be and they know much more about the show than we do. One of them is the guy we go to anytime we have a very specific [question about the lore]
. He's better than the wiki page, which is what we used to go to.
Weiss: How different is the production process now when compared to the original run?
Marsh: The production method is slightly different, but as far as the ideas that are being generated and the execution go, it feels like we haven't missed a step.
Povenmire: When we first did the show, we did it as an outline show, where the board artists would write the dialogue as they were going. Then we would all get together and rewrite the dialogue. That's a fun way to do a show, but running an outline-driven show is a young man's job, and I wasn't a young man the first time I did it. [For the new seasons], we came up with this hybrid [model] where we do a script, so that the framework is there and nobody goes off on weird tangents. Then we just let the board artists add jokes in. We let them know, 'Add to this all you want. As long as I laugh, it's gonna stay in."
Weiss: Take me back to the very beginning. Where did you first get the idea for the show?
Marsh: We'd met on The Simpsons many years ago, and [then] I ended up on a show where they were letting us write and storyboard. My first call was to Dan to say, 'Dude, you've got to get over here! They're letting us write stuff!' After the first rotation, they shuffled the teams around, and Dan and I were put together on the writing team. At the end of the first episode we wrote together, we decided we had more ideas than we could use, so editing was a bigger problem than writing. And then we wrote a song at the end of it that nobody asked for. That's when we thought, 'Oh, we should create a show! Then we could sell it and keep working together!'
Povenmire: It took 13 years.
Marsh: And we didn't work together that whole time, so it wasn't a great plan after all.
Povenmire: But it worked out okay in the end.
Marsh: We just wanted to celebrate the summers the way that they were in our imagination. What would you do as a 10-year-old over summer vacation if you had no real financial [constraints]?
Povenmire: It was also a throwback to a time before video games, before VHS, when the most fun thing to do would be go outside and play and build things. We both built tree houses and forts and went on adventures out in the woods, made a zip line…
MADRID, SPAIN - OCTOBER 04: Dan Povenmire (L) and Jeff "Swampy" Marsh (R) attend "Phineas and Ferb" ... More photocall on October 4, 2011 in Madrid, Spain. (Photo by)
Weiss: At what point did you guys decide you'd be voicing characters (namely Dr. Doofenshmirtz and Major Francis Monogram) on the show?
Povenmire: We wanted to do that pretty early on. When I pitched the storyboard for the first episode, I was just doing a voice for Doofenshmirtz and the executive said, 'I think maybe you should do that voice.' I was like, 'Okay!' and I did it for the pilot. When we went to series, we wanted to do those voices [full time] and they still made us audition other people.
Weiss: When did you realize the show had become a cultural phenomenon?
Povenmire: It was pretty early on … My goal was to make a show that changed the demographic of Disney Channel. I'd been on The Simpsons when it changed the demographic of Fox and I'd been on on SpongeBob when it changed the demographic of Nickelodeon. I felt like that was the high benchmark to go for. And within the first two months on the air, there'd been multiple articles written about how we had changed the demographic of Disney Channel. That's when I realized, 'Oh, this, this worked! We did it!'
Marsh: I remember I was out ice skating at one of those public outdoor rinks and a little girl skated by singing, 'S'winter.' It's the first time a song I had written was spontaneously sung back to me without [the person] knowing I was there. I was like, 'Oh, wow, we've really gotten into the fabric.' Then tattoos started showing up and you're like, "Oh my God, what kind of weird reality is this?!''
Weiss: What, in your opinion, made the show resonate so deeply with audiences?
Povenmire: We made a decision early on to make it smart and funny, but also not mean. We don't have any mean-spirited humor in it. We have no shocking humor, we don't do double entendres or anything like that.
Marsh: We wanted to get as much humor as we could without resorting to a cast of jerks and idiots.
Povenmire: Yeah, we didn't want to make anybody really mean or anybody really stupid. We've got Buford, who's a bit of a numbskull, but we actually find out that he speaks fluent French. We also have Doofenshmirtz, who, for all his postulating that he's evil, is really just a nice guy trying to get attention. So we made this choice for it to be a nice show and see if we could still make it funny. Because the easiest place to go for a laugh is to be shocking or mean. We didn't do that and somehow, we're still able to make it funny. And then there are the songs.
Marsh: That's the icing on the cake.
Povenmire: We're both failed musicians.
Marsh: Our rock and roll career did not go the way we wanted, but since then, we've written almost 600 songs.
Povenmire: I played in a band for 16 years until I finally quit because I had sold this silly cartoon show to Disney and a year later, got Emmy nominated for two of the songs. [In addition], the soundtrack album charted at 57 or something on the Billboard Hot 100. We were between Beyoncé and Pink for a week.
Marsh: Our secret to success in the music industry was to quit the music industry.
Weiss: How would you describe your songwriting process?
Povenmire: It takes about an hour. We're not trying to get out any inner demons. We don't have to wait for the muse to get us. We know what's happening in the story. It's like, 'Well, we need to write a song about a girl that has squirrels in her pants.' We wrote that song and 15 years later, it becomes a trend on TikTok.
Marsh: All we have to do is write a song that's fun and catchy and hooky and helps move the story along.
Weiss: What would you say are some of the biggest lessons you picked up working on other classic shows (like The Simpsons and SpongeBob) that you were able to bring to your own show?
Povenmire: I think it's just the sensibility of trying to put as many jokes in as possible, trying to keep that rhythm going. A lot of times when I see an animated comedy show fail, it's because they're very slow. There's nobody really pulling out all the air they can pull out. And because we have everything go at a rapid pace, when we pause for something, there's an actual laugh connected to that pause.
Marsh: I always said I'd much rather have 12 pounds of funny in a 10-pound bag. So when guys used to come to us and say, 'I think this should be a 22-minute episode instead of an 11-minute episode,' we would say, '…it's probably an 11-minute episode.'
Povenmire: We should probably cut it down rather than pad it out.
Marsh: To me, it's always been the smart stuff. Keep the smart in. The show that I grew up on that was huge influence on me was Rocky and Bullwinkle. It was always intelligent and smart. There were always jokes that were over my head, and that was okay, because they weren't the only jokes. It meant everybody in the room could laugh.
Weiss: Dan, you mentioned songs from the showing going viral on TikTok, where you've had a lot of success as a content creator. Can you talk about your social media presence?
Povenmire: It's been really fun. I was on Instagram and Twitter during the [show's original run]. Those were the big ones back then. After Phineas went off the air, I'd never really gained anything on those [platforms] and figured people had forgotten and moved on to something else. It wasn't until I picked up TikTok that I was like, 'Oh! If I talk like Doofenshmirtz on this app, it'll get millions of views!' And suddenly, I had millions and millions of followers. I was just like, 'Okay, they didn't disappear, they just all went to this app.' It was so humbling to see how much Gen Z was still thinking about the show. Anytime I wanted to get misty during the pandemic, I would just look up one of the songs we'd written and see hundreds of thousands of videos people had done, lip syncing to the song, or doing covers of the song. There are so many different versions of 'Busted,' where people have done the split screen that's so easy on TikTok. 'There's a Platypus Controlling Me' was a trend for a while. And then [the] 'Squirrels in My Pants' [trend] was just insane. Lizzo did it onstage in front of a sold out crowd. Jimmy Fallon and Reese Witherspoon, Zooey Deschanel [and Drew Barrymore]. Every morning I'd turn my phone on and see some other new person doing that. It was weird.
Weiss: What would you say has been the most surreal moment since creating Phineas & Ferb?
Marsh: We had Michelle Obama dancing with Perry the Platypus.
Povenmire: That was bizarre. To me, the weirdest moment was one of the few times that while I was awake, I started to doubt that this was real. It was when we had Wayne Newton in Las Vegas performing the Perry the Platypus theme. We were front-row, and he was performing the Perry the Platypus theme with a bunch of Vegas showgirls in platypus-themed costumes with masks of Perry the Platypus. I think that's the only time I've ever been awake and wondered whether I was actually dreaming. It just felt like, 'Wait, this can't be real, right?! This isn't really happening!'
Weiss: What was the challenge of bringing show back in a way that appealed to both longtime fans and newcomers alike?
Marsh: [jokingly] What we really wanted to do is exclude the new people. If you weren't a fan originally, we were trying to alienate you.
Povenmire: We sprinkle in episodes that we call 'evergreen, episodes," which follow the formula of the original show. And then we'll do episodes that break that formula in a way. But we try not to put too many of those in a row, because we want it to still feel familiar to people. So we put in episodes that feel like they would have been at home in the first season, but then we'll also have lots of fun breaking the formula of what the show is as a source of humor.
Weiss: Anything to add?
Povenmire: I think it may be our best season ever. There's a lot of people who have had favorite episodes of this show for [almost] 20 years. I think that there's probably 10 episodes this season that are going to change people's minds about what their favorite episode is. There's going to be some favorite episodes that get supplanted with that, because it's starting to happen to me where I'm like, 'This may be my favorite thing we've ever done.'
Season 5 of Phineas and Ferb premieres on Disney Channel & Disney XD this Thursday (June 5) at 8:00 p.m. ET.
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