‘Phineas and Ferb’ Creators Discuss the Show’s Lasting Footprint — and How It Led to New Episodes

The way the creators of Phineas and Ferb tell it, there wasn’t much to restarting the beloved animated series.

“Disney called and said, ‘Do you want to?’,” co-creator Jeff “Swampy” Marsh says with a laugh.

Co-creator Dan Povenmire fills in a few more details: “[The show has] maintained a popularity in reruns for a long time. Then with Disney+, people told us over and over again that Phineas is always in the top five things on Disney+. I think it’s a very rewatchable show, which I’m thankful for,” Povenmire tells The Hollywood Reporter. “They had us do that movie in 2020 [Candace Against the Universe] that did really well, and we always sort of figured they would ask for some more movies or some more specials. Then they called up and said, would you do 40 more episodes and get back into production on the series? We’re like, ‘Yeah, I guess.’ We were thrilled by the idea, but that was not what we were expecting from them at all.”

The stats back up Povenmire’s assertion. Since Phineas and Ferb premiered on Disney Channel in August 2007, viewers have watched 12.6 billion hours’ worth of the show (including its movies, specials and related shorts) across Disney’s cable channels and streaming platforms. Since Disney+ launched in late 2019, its users have watched about 665 million hours of Phineas and Ferb.

To put that in context, about 156,360 hours of real time have elapsed between the series premiere and the publication of this story.

The show’s fifth season premiered on Disney Channel and Disney XD on June 5, with the first 10 episodes streaming on Disney+ a day later (episodes continue rolling out weekly on the cable channels). Viewing for that week doubled over the previous seven days, Disney says (though exact numbers aren’t available).

“Phineas and Ferb is that rare franchise that connects across generations, engaging kids with its humor and music, while sparking nostalgia and deep fandom among longtime viewers,” Disney Branded Television president Ayo Davis said. “The response to the new season has been incredible, fueling passion, viewership, and a whole new wave of discovery.”

Povenmire and Marsh talked with THR about why they think Phineas and Ferb has endured and how they’re now working with writers who started as young fans of the show’s first run.

To what do you attribute the show’s long afterlife? Obviously being on Disney+ has helped, but it was doing well even before that.

POVENMIRE I think a couple of things. Swampy and I made a decision really early on to make it a genuinely nice show, while still trying to make it edgy, but not having any of the characters motivated by meanness. When we sold Phineas to Disney, a friend of mine said he didn’t let his kids watch shows on Disney. And I was like, Really, why? [He said] because Disney wants it two ways. There’s always a good moral message at the end, but the character that the kids remember and quote from is always saying mean, nasty things. It’s always that character that’s more interesting. And I wondered if we could do a show where nobody is saying mean things, and we’re not going to the mean place for humor. … I think it made us better writers, and I think it made the show resonate much more, because I think everybody likes everybody in the show.

Then there’s the music. We put a song in every episode, and we’re pretty good at writing fun, catchy songs. So I think that stuff gets in people’s brains, and I think that also brings them back.

MARSH We tried to do it without populating the show with a cast of jerks and idiots. We didn’t want the friends to be jerks and idiots. The other thing that that I think was a great decision was making sure that we kept the show smart. We didn’t cut jokes simply because they were too smart for the audience. We said it’s OK to have jokes that are there just for the parents or the aunts and uncles or the grandparents. It should be family viewing, and as long as those aren’t the only jokes, I think we’ll be all right.

Do you have a favorite of those jokes that was aimed more at the adults watching?

MARSH Mine will always be — we did a joke with Buford [voiced by Bobby Gaylor] and Baljeet [Maulik Pancholy] swapping existentialist philosopher trading cards. “I’ll trade you like two Nietzsches.” Somebody said, “Oh, the kids won’t get that.” We’re like, gosh, the adults won’t get that. That one is for philosophy students.

POVENMIRE That’s a two percenter, for 2 percent of the population.

MARSH The joke was still written in a way that you didn’t need to know all of that stuff to get the joke that we were doing. But if you did know, there was a little kicker and a bonus in there.

The voice cast for the new season is pretty much the same, but did you also bring back a lot of the writers and artists who worked on the original run?

MARSH The writers room kind of became a mix of some of the original writers, and some of the folks that had been doing storyboard writing have now moved into the writers room. Olivia Olson, who still is the voice of Vanessa for us, has moved into the writers room as well.

POVENMIRE We’ve got a lot of younger [writers] too. So, the room is basically 50 percent us old folks who were on the original run, and 50 percent young people who grew up with the show, or sometimes on the show, like Olivia. They often have a better knowledge of what we did in the show than we do.

What was it like getting back into the swing of doing this on a regular basis?

POVENMIRE We were a little we were trepidatious at first. We were like, we would love to do it, but it may be a lot of work because we’ve done so many stories. There’s that South Park joke of “The Simpsons did it,” where they were trying to come up with a new thing to do that hadn’t been done in some episode of The Simpsons. We were afraid we were going to do that with our own show [and be] like, “Nope. We did that. We did that. We did that.” That has not been the case at all. The room is just full of energy, and they’re pitching just great, wonderful stories. It was like, “Oh, how come we never did that? We should definitely do that.” We’re having a great time.

When you ended the original run, did you still have ideas left on the board? And did any of them make it into the new episodes?

POVENMIRE Some have. There are a couple things that we sort of promised, and then when we realized that we might not have another season [in the first run], we decided to go ahead and make a finale out of it. We were in a place where we had a year and a half of episodes already banked. [Disney wanted] to wait and see — “We feel like we’ve been on a big wave here, but we’re going to see what the ratings are like at the end of this before we pick up another season.” And we were like, we’ve been doing this for 10 years. Could you let us actually finish the show? We’d love to do a last day of summer so that there is an actual finale for the show. And they said OK, but don’t kill anybody off so we could do more later. That ended up being the reason that it went away.

MARSH We had a couple we didn’t get to. We have the “Meap” series that everybody wanted to see the next episode of, which was “Meap Me in St Louis.” That was fun. As soon as we got back, it was like, oh boy, we get to do “Meap Me in St Louis.”

POVENMIRE We had made a trailer for an episode that would be coming at some point in the future, and then just never did that episode. Some people asked for that, and we also made this bit about Stacy [voiced by Kelly Hu], Candace’s [Ashley Tisdale] best friend, being the only child who knew that Perry the Platypus was an actual secret agent, and we just had never done anything with it. We were planning on doing that if we had done another season, then we decided not to do another season. So we’ve done a couple episodes that touch on that, including one that’s just Stacy’s story from beginning to end.

If anything, what do you feel like is different about the new season?

POVENMIRE Phineas was always what I call it a gag tree. We set it up to have a very specific structure to the stories. It’s basically Snuffleupagus in Sesame Street, where no matter how much you think that mom is going to see [Phineas and Ferb’s latest creation], it disappears at the end. What we’ve done this season, which I think sort of elevates the season to a certain extent, is make it try to feel like the original show, but also play with that scaffolding a little bit and poke fun at exactly what the show is. For instance, Candace and Doofenshmirtz [voiced by Povenmire], we find out, are going to the same therapist. [The therapist is] hearing these stories from both ends, and he’s starting to believe, wait a minute, I think this is really happening. He tries to prove that it’s really happening to get some fame, and then things go wrong for him, the way things always go wrong for Candace when she’s trying to prove it.

My kids are big fans of the show and had a couple of questions. First, are there any new characters this season?

I asked my kids if they had any questions for you, and they did have a couple. First, will we see any new characters in the new episodes?

POVENMIRE We have a lot of new characters, and we’ve had some great guest stars who came in. I don’t know that we’ve added any new characters that are going to be there on a regular basis. We’ve expanded one character that’s recurring a lot, Dink Winkerson, who’s the TV news reporter in the area. His role has become much more three-dimensional. There are a lot of things going on with him — he’s not a main character, but we’re getting a lot of humor from seeing where he is episode after episode.

MARSH That was fun for me, because it was the second character that I voiced that we really didn’t have big plans for other than kind of delivering information occasionally. All of a sudden, the writers have given these characters this whole other life, which is fun to watch and really great to voice.

My daughter was curious as to why Candace is always trying to rat the boys out? What’s her motivation?

POVENMIRE If you don’t pay attention to the show in a specific way, she can come across as a little tattletale-ish — and she is, but she’s not trying to hurt her brothers. She’s not trying to get them in trouble because she doesn’t like them or wants them to suffer. She just feels, and this is how we always write her, that if she were to do what they are doing, she would get in trouble. So it’s only fair that mom sees what they’re doing. It’s sort of like Jeanie [Jennifer Grey] in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. She doesn’t hate Ferris. She gets angry at the fact that he gets away with stuff that she doesn’t get away with.