Phineas and Ferb
"Ferb, I know what we're gonna do today!" Two stepbrothers build a roller coaster or get a band back together before lunch, their sister Candace fails to bust them, and their pet platypus slips off to fight Dr. Doofenshmirtz, whose latest invention erases the evidence just in time. Disney's 104-days-of-summer cartoon ran a song in nearly every episode and became one of the channel's biggest animated hits.
Dan Povenmire and Jeff "Swampy" Marsh met as layout artists on The Simpsons and became a writing team on Rocko's Modern Life, where they came up with the show. Povenmire sketched a "triangle kid" on butcher paper at a restaurant in South Pasadena, decided it "looked like a Phineas," and named Ferb after a friend who "owns more tools than anyone in the world." Then they pitched it for 16 years. Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Fox Kids all passed on a premise they considered too complex, until Disney took it on with a challenge: "Let's see if you can do it in 11 minutes," then 26 episodes. Povenmire, who had worked on Family Guy, described the result as a combination of Family Guy and SpongeBob SquarePants.
The pilot, "Rollercoaster," previewed on August 17, 2007, right after High School Musical 2, and held 10.8 million viewers, more than half of that record-setting lead-in. The series officially premiered on February 1, 2008, and was immediately cable's number-one animated premiere among tweens. Every episode ran the same engine: Phineas and Ferb's impossible project in the fictional town of Danville, Candace's doomed attempt to show their mother, and Perry the Platypus, Agent P of the O.W.C.A., foiling Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz, voiced by Povenmire himself, with the two plots colliding to wipe the evidence away. The running gags were the point: "Hey, where's Perry?", a disbelieving adult asking "Aren't you a little young..." and Phineas's "Yes, yes we are." Vincent Martella voiced Phineas, Thomas Sangster voiced Ferb, Ashley Tisdale was Candace and Marsh was Major Monogram.
After Disney executives heard "Gitchee, Gitchee Goo" in the early episode "Flop Starz," they asked for a song in every episode, and the creators obliged across genres from madrigals to Broadway, singing new numbers into composer Danny Jacob's answering machine on Friday nights. Bowling for Soup's theme "Today Is Gonna Be a Great Day" earned a 2008 Emmy nomination, and the show won a Daytime Emmy for writing in 2010. A TV movie, Across the 2nd Dimension, aired in 2011, and the hour-long finale "Last Day of Summer" closed the original run on June 12, 2015. Disney ordered two more seasons in 2023; the revival began in June 2025.
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