Phineas and Ferb is coming back to Disney with brand new episodes a decade after the original series came to an end, and we got to talk with the creators behind it all about how they’re making it happen. Phineas and Ferb wrapped up its original run with four seasons back in 2015, and the animated series is still one of the most popular animated franchises to ever come from the company. But even with that popularity, it’s still a big surprise to see that the animated series is coming back for new episodes picking up from where it all left off.
Phineas and Ferb has returned for a new season that not only brings back the original creators, but the voice cast as well. Speaking to ComicBook ahead of the new season’s premiere, Phineas and Ferb creators Dan Povenmire and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh opened up all about returning for the new episodes, getting back to work with Disney, what might have or haven’t changed from the original, and more. Read on for our full conversation with the creative duo (which has been edited for length and clarity)!
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NICK VALDEZ, COMICBOOK: My mind’s been blown ever since it was announced that Phineas and Ferb was even coming back for a revival, so I can’t imagine what it’s like for you all. So how how did it feel to actually get in there and work on new Phineas and Ferb after all this time?
DAN POVENMIRE: Well, we were a little worried that because we did 222 episodes, seven hour long specials, and two movies…there’s a lot of content out there. We were a little worried we’d get into the writer’s room and just be going, “No, we already did that. No. We already did that. We already did no. Sorry, that doesn’t work.” And it has not been like that at all. I mean, those things happen periodically, but that may happen, like, once or twice a week. And all the other [time] we’re getting so many great pitches for new ideas for episodes. We’re like, “Why did we never do that?” Things that we had always wanted to do and hadn’t quite figured out how to do it. We’ve been able to break some stories that we like, “I always wanted to do this, but how would we make that work in our universe?”
It’s maybe my favorite season of the show. After all those episodes, there’s so many iconic episodes that people have as “This is their favorite episode or this is their favorite episode.” I think there’s probably eight or ten episodes this season that will supplant those episodes in people’s minds as their favorite. I think there’s gonna be people who are like, “Okay. This is now my favorite.” And then five episodes later, they’ll go, “Mow this is my favorite episode of all time.” There’s some that I put up in that top 10 in my brain.
JEFF “SWAMPY” MARSH: It was every so often in the downtime, since the first series ended, we’d get calls from Disney kind of saying, “Hey, if we brought back Phineas and Ferb, would you guys wanna make more?” It was always tentative over the years. And we were always like, “Yeah, sure we love these characters. We’d love to come back.” So when they when they finally called and said, “Yeah, we really wanna do more, and we just want more of the same.” I was thrilled because I didn’t wanna have to reinvent it, reimagine it. I just liked what we were doing, and I thought we still had stories to tell. Again, it doesn’t mean we didn’t have the fear that we weren’t gonna be able to find new things, but it was exciting to do it.
I was curious about that myself too because usually when you get a new show like this, it usually is a reboot after such a long period of time. So I was wondering why the approach was, “Oh, we’re just picking it up right back with the next Summer” rather than reinvent the wheel. Was it a Disney initiative then to bring it back the same way?
POVENMIRE: Yeah. What they said was, “Look, we just want more Phineas. We don’t think it’s broken. We don’t think you need to fix it. That being said, you can do whatever you want with it. We trust you to to make this show.” My goal has always been if people were watching fourth season and they just continued right into fifth season, they wouldn’t notice a bump. You know? They wouldn’t notice anything different about it. It would just feel like, “Oh, fresh new episodes!”
Speaking of that final season, one of the biggest events among fans that I still kind of hope we get to see more of was the “Act Your Age” timeline of ten years in the future. So I do have to ask a little bit about that. Is there potential to revisit that [timeline] or maybe even some other points in their life now that you brought the series back?
MARSH: We haven’t said no to anything yet, and it’s been kind of fun. Although I think we had the same freedom when we made the first episodes, it felt this time like, “Oh, we’re getting a whole fresh batch. We can go explore things that we didn’t think we could.” And I’m sure we could’ve, but now it feels like we can give some air to a whole Buford episode or a whole Baljeet episode. So it means things like that are a lot more possible. We have episodes that are just focusing on the Fireside Girls.
POVENMIRE: We have an episode that focuses on a zoetrope that just rolls around the city and and solves crimes.
MARSH: And has a full and rich emotional life, and a song of its own.
POVENMIRE: Yet no sentience.
MARSH: I think, if we were to go back and do something with the older characters, it would just have to be a good enough story and an emotional enough story to make that compelling.
One thing I did notice was that it also visually looks different. Is it a change in technology? Is it a change in just how you are doing the process after all these years?
POVENMIRE: When we first did Phineas and Ferb, we were drawing on paper. But by the end of that, we were drawing pretty much digitally. We’re drawing digitally on screens. It’s still drawn by hand, but it has a cleaner look now than it did then so that works. We’ve tried to make it look pretty much like the old stuff, but we’ve done little slight changes. The characters are all the same design except for Phineas. He’s not any taller, but we did draw an extra stripe on his shirt so that’s how you know he’s older. It’s like dating a tree, you know? You just count the rings. As soon as the art as soon dropped, people were like, “Wait, they put too many too many stripes on his shirt.” That’s on purpose.
Phineas and Ferb Season 5 premieres on the Disney Channel June 5th, and is available for streaming on Disney+ beginning June 6th.
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