The Big Picture

The creators of Phineas and Ferb strive to make their show feel timeless and relevant, avoiding jokes that are tied to specific moments in time. They are conscious of the show’s international audience and work with translators to ensure that the humor translates effectively. The creators prioritize making a funny and edgy show without resorting to mean-spirited or crude humor, and they include smart jokes that may go over kids’ heads but provide entertainment for adult viewers.

The weather might be getting colder, but we’re already looking ahead to summer vacation, with two new seasons of Disney’s wildly popular animated series Phineas and Ferb in development now for Disney+. Created by Dan Povenmire and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh, Phineas and Ferb follows the two titular brothers as they find something creative to do every day of summer vacation, to the frustration of their older sister Candace. Meanwhile their pet platypus Perry lives a secret double life, moonlighting as a secret agent out to stop the evil Dr. Doofenshmirtz (voiced by Povenmire).

At a NYCC roundtable with Collider’s Arezou Amin, Povenmire and Marsh, who are returning for the new batch of episodes, talked about how they keep their long-running animated series feeling timeless, yet of its time, going into the new batch of episodes. They also talk about how their distinctive humor works in translation, and the challenge of telling a funny story that’s neither mean-spirited nor crude. They also reveal the one type of joke they’ll never cut out.

The thing about Phineas and Ferb that I love is just how timeless it feels. So what I want to know going into it again now, is that something that comes naturally, that kind of timeless ethereal childhood thing, or is this something you need to really be cognizant of?

DAN POVENMIRE: Well, we are sort of cognizant because when we started Phineas and Ferb, not everybody had a cell phone in their pocket with an unlimited amount of photos they could take. And so we did have a whole conversation about that, like we want them to look like they’re of this time also. So it’s like, “how do we deal with that?” We tried not to do jokes that were tied specifically to a specific moment in time. And we always are cognizant of “what if somebody watches this in 10 years? Will that still be funny?”

JEFF “SWAMPY” MARSH: And it usually works. There are some things you look back on and go, “That dates it, doesn’t it? Oh, well.”

POVENMMIRE: But we just try to think, because the show goes out globally, “Is this joke going to land internationally, if it’s translated into another language?” Even if it’s not, if it’s really short, we’ll let it go. And we talked to the guys in, maybe France who do the actual translation.

MARSH: And the songs.

POVENMIRE: And we said, “hey, what do you do with things that are obviously American culture references?” And he said, “well, we know where the joke is. There’s a rhythm to your humor. So we know this is obviously a joke line. We might not get it, so we’ll write some other joke to put in there.”

MARSH: The funniest thing is the music, because we do stuff in the music that has jokes in it, and also moving the plot along, and has to rhyme. And I’ve sat with my wife, who’s Dutch, and asked her to translate it, and I’m shocked at how great a job they do overseas at preserving all of those things. It’s kind of terrifying.

I am not your target demographic, but I love the show. What, for the two of you, is your trick, technique, to make sure that it does speak to everybody?

MARSH: We’ve always made the show for us. We just try to make each other laugh and enjoy it without including the inappropriate stuff. Really early on [Povenmire] had a conversation with somebody at Disney and came and said, “look, if we can make a show that’s still cool and funny and edgy without it being just filled with jerks and idiots, it’s gonna be harder but the reward is gonna be amazing.”

POVENMIRE: Easy place to go for a laugh is something mean or something shocking. And if we take those two things out of our repertoire, can we still make a funny show that feels edgy and somehow we were able to do it.

MARSH: And the other agreement we made, we were never gonna cut anything because somebody said it was too smart for our audience. So my favorite example of that is we had Buford and Baljeet trading Existentialist Philosopher trading cards. And somebody said, “I don’t know if the kids will get that joke.” And I was like, “dude, the adults won’t get that joke. There’s five philosophy majors at a college that’ll laugh, but that’s ok.” The worst that could happen is there might be a conversation, and somebody later will feel like, “oh, I know what that is.” It was something that we both bonded over was growing up with Jay Ward and his cartoons like Rocky and Bullwinkle.

And he was perfect at that. He would include stuff that was clearly over everybody’s head. But I remember one day I was watching it and my grandmother laughed because they made a joke about the “Ruby yacht of Omar Khayyam.” My grandmother laughed and I turned around and said, “what are you laughing at?” She went and got the book, and I went to school feeling like “I know why that was funny. You fools don’t.” And I wanted to preserve that. So any time we ever got a note saying it’s too intellectual, we’re not cutting it.

POVENMIRE: We would occasionally get “is our audience even gonna get that?” and it was like, “as long as your audience doesn’t change the channel, we don’t care because we’re playing to the adults in the room and I guarantee you there’s a joke for the kids coming in five seconds.” So we just try to fill it with as much humor as we could.

Image via Disney

I guess the added advantage is when the kids get older and see that reference in real life context, it’s like “It was on Phineas and Ferb”, it’ll click for them later.

POVENMIRE: We watched Bugs Bunny and Rocky and Bullwinkle, we watched a bunch of things when we were kids, and then got different jokes when we were in our teens, and different jokes in our twenties and different jokes in our thirties. And that’s what we hope Phineas and Ferb does, like all the kids that rewatched it during pandemic in their twenties, I think, got more from it than they did when they watched it when they were 11.

MARSH: But it is weird now, when we’re out and about, and we see how our audience has aged up. I remember, there’s a couple of great things that happened. The guy Jared Reddick, from the band Bowling for Soup who sang our theme song, now goes around the world and plays it, and he usually only has to do the first note before the audience sings along. But he cut a great montage of him in nightclubs like all over England, Scotland, Wales. So it’s giant room full of clearly drunk teenage and college students singing along to our theme song in a nightclub. It’s brilliant.

And I was getting my injection for COVID, in this huge room at this hospital with a bunch of interns. The guy said, “what do you do?” And we got into a little conversation and I said, “I created Phineas and Ferb,” and he said. “Oh my God!” And he stood up in the room and said “This is one of the guys who created Phineas and Ferb” and the whole place went crazy. And I’m like “How do you…oh yeah, that’s all my audience. They have grown up. They’re now interns, which is weird.”

You can watch Phineas and Ferb on Disney+ now.