Looking at the unbridled success of Phineas and Ferb, it's hard to imagine a time when creators Dan Povenmire and Jeff "Swampy" Marsh had to battle for its existence and integrity.
The Disney Channel series, which premiered in 2007, ran for 137 episodes across four seasons and sparked two made-for-TV movies, as well as video games. The characters became iconic in their own time, and again in memes years later as the child fans of the show grew to be TikTokking adults. When Disney+ launched in 2019, the show soon became a favorite on the streaming service, years after the Season 4 finale. So, the studio asked Povenmire and Marsh to come back for a fifth season, 10 years after Season 4 wrapped!
To celebrate the launch of Season 5 of Phineas and Ferb, the show's animated creators (or the animated show's creators) came by the Mashable studio for our Say More interview series. You can watch the whole interview on YouTube. Below, we dive into some of the wildest stories of the show's success.
Phineas and Ferb was a dream project for 16 years before it premiered.
On the Say More couch, Povenmire and Marsh recounted how they pitched the series for 13 years while working on other animated series like Family Guy and Rocko's Modern Life. It took another three years in development before the show's premiere on the Disney Channel.
In all that time, the pair were committed to their concept. Today, they are still proud to say the pilot was "the exact same show" that they'd pitched for all those years. But making the Phineas and Ferb they dreamed of didn't come without some battles — including one over their triangle-headed hero's signature look.
Dan Povenmire's ultimatum saved Phineas' face.
"A friend of mine told me once," Povenmire said, "that the most amount of power you can have in Hollywood as a creative — as somebody who's not holding the purse strings — is to maintain the ability to be OK to walk away from something. Know where that line in the sand is and just say, 'OK, no, no, thank you.'"
Sharing a moment when he almost walked away, he continued, "We didn't have to use that very often. But there was a time when the pilot tested really well." And yet Disney executives pitched changes anyway, including redesigning the characters to make them "more attractive." After three meetings with such notes, Povenmire had had enough.
He recalled, "I finally pulled one of the executives aside and said, 'You know, you can make whatever show you want, because you bought it. It belongs to you. But if you want me to come work on it, it's gonna have to be the show I pitched you. Otherwise, I'll just stay at Fox this year [working on Family Guy], and you guys can make the show.
"I wasn't mean about it," Povenmire noted, "I was just like, this is the show I want to make. I don't want to make some other version of it. [After that], they sort of just started deferring to us for everything."
On why they felt capable of saying no in the face of such studio pressure, Marsh mused, "Probably because we'd already pitched it for 13 years. The urgency was gone. We'd waited this long."
Still, there were other battles ahead. Marsh explained, "The things that we fought for was stuff that we really believed in. And most of it was about — I think for us — it was trusting that the kid audience was smart — smarter than most people gave them credit for. So those tended to be the things that we leaned into, that we thought were worth fighting for."
He added that fans appreciated that trust, saying, "It's nice that [for] almost every one of those things, we've had multiple people come to us and go, 'I want to thank you for this.'"
Povenmire and Marsh fought for divorce and alimony to be a part of Phineas and Ferb.
On the show, Phineas and Ferb are stepbrothers, with Candace and Phineas' mom having married Ferb's dad. This blended family wasn't a problem to Disney execs. However, actually using the word "divorce" on the show was.
"We weren't aware that the word 'divorce' had never been used on the Disney Channel [shows] before," Marsh explained. "Somebody had said, 'You know, we can't say that.' And my personal situation, my mom's currently on husband number seven... It made that [note] really personal for me. And I'm like, 'Look, half of your audience is living in a situation that you're saying is so horrible that the word is not utterable. You can't do that.'"
Povenmire added, "They were like, 'What happens if one of our audience members, their parents are going through a divorce?' I said, 'I'm sure that's the case.' They said, 'Well, what happens then?' I was like, 'Then they'll feel seen, they'll feel represented.'"
Marsh continued, "And we had a couple of really great executives working with us, really championing the show, who really listened to us, listened to the arguments, and come back to say, 'You've made really great points. Go for it.'"
However, Povenmire noted, "Then, the very next episode, we wanted to say that Doofenshmirtz was getting alimony from Charlene because she was independently wealthy. And then we had to go through three or four more meetings to see if we could say the word alimony in the show."
In end, they could and did.
Phineas and Ferb was never just for kids.
Marsh noted a recurring concern for Disney was that the humor of Phineas and Ferb might "go over the heads" of the target audience of children. He explained, "We had to say, that's OK. We're also acknowledging there are parents in the room, or aunts and uncles or grandparents, or whoever it is, and it's OK that there's stuff in there for them too."
Povenmire added, "Then 40% of our audience became adults, and they stopped giving us that note."
Looking back on these battles to make Phineas and Ferb the success that it is, Marsh reflects, "In hindsight, I'm really grateful that it took us 13 years to sell the show, because in that time, I think we changed. We grew. Our reputations were a lot better, and we also knew how to argue for what we believed in better. We were much more effective at being advocates for the things we believed in, that I don't know if we'd have been able to do back when we first started. So it all worked out at the right time, the right way."
For more on Phineas and Ferb from Povenmire and Marsh, check out Say More's full interview on YouTube.
How to watch: Phineas and Ferb Season 5 is now streaming on Disney+.
