‘Phineas and Ferb' Sticks to What Works in a Welcome Return

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2 days ago

Most TV revivals are bad. They exist solely for the cynical purpose of exploiting a familiar title, not because there are new stories worth telling in a particular world. Good TV shows are the product of a specific time in the lives of the characters on the show, the people making the show, and the people watching at home. Change one or more of those, and it usually doesn't work.
There are exceptions, of course. The passage of time in some ways enhanced both Roseanne/The Conners and Party Down, because they're shows about people in dire financial straits, and revisiting them in an even worse economy made the comic stakes even sharper. And Twin Peaks: The Return was a masterpiece because traditional rules of storytelling never applied to David Lynch.
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Now there's Disney's Phineas and Ferb, returning with its first new season in a decade. The family TV classic is animated, which helps enormously, because the characters don't have to age (though they do very slightly). More importantly, it's a show designed to be both timeless and formulaic, so that it can return in any era, act exactly like it always has, and nothing will seem amiss.
As the infectious Bowling for Soup theme song has long explained, the title characters — stepbrothers in a blended family (voiced in the original series by, respectively, Vincent Martella and Thomas Brodie-Sangster) who live in an unnamed tri-state area — have 104 days of summer vacation to fill, and the kind of boundless imaginations, technical skills, and resources to do anything they want. In various episodes of the original series, they traveled through time and space, built the world's biggest roller coaster, and designed a plane that allowed them to circumnavigate the globe in one incredibly long summer day by always staying ahead of the sunset. Their older sister Candace (Ashley Tisdale) is obsessed with busting them by showing their mother Linda (Caroline Rhea) the boys' wild and dangerous creations. And every episode has a subplot where the family's pet platypus, Perry, secretly works as a spy, who is constantly trying to prevent the 'evil' — really, just annoying — schemes of pathetic mad scientist Heinz Doofenshmirtz (played by the show's co-creator, Dan Povenmire). Inevitably, the plots intersect when Doof's latest gadget (which always has the suffix '-inator') somehow erases evidence of the boys' latest scheme just before Linda can get a look at it.
And that's it: the same idea, repeated in two stories per episode, for nearly 140 episodes that aired over eight years. But the genius of what Povenmire, co-creator Jeff 'Swampy' Marsh, and company did over those eight years was the way they gradually turned that rigid formula to their advantage. Once the audience understood that the same story beats would happen in the same rough order from week to week, no matter how different the inventions, the more the show got to have fun with it. At times, it involved the characters becoming aware of those recurring tropes, like Candace eventually deciding that there's some universal force preventing Linda from ever seeing what the boys are really doing, or Doofenshmirtz noticing when Perry is late or otherwise not following his usual routine. At others, the show found ways to subvert its own formula while somehow sticking with it; in one classic episode, Candace and Doof's teenage daughter Vanessa (Olivia Olson) swap outfits after a dry cleaner mix-up, and as a result, the usual A-story/B-story structure gets flipped, so that it's Doof with a big idea (trying to build his own floating island nation), while the boys build an -inator (albeit one with a benign purpose, to show a friend what they think will be her first rainbow).
The only thing standing even partially in the way of a revival is the fact that the show had a definitive ending in 2015, with an episode set on the last day of that wonderful summer vacation. When the team reunited briefly for the 2020 movie Candace Against the Universe, the story was set earlier in that summer. As it is, there are far more individual stories than would fit into even a 104-day summer. At some point, the story needs to move forward, even a little(*).
(*) There was another 2015 episode, 'Act Your Age,' set 10 years in the future, where the boys and their friends are preparing to leave for college. But nothing in it would significantly constrain stories set in the kids' present-day lives.
And that is basically what this fifth season does. We begin on the last day of the school year, as Phineas has just finished telling the class about all the adventures he, Ferb, Isabella (Alyson Stoner), Baljeet (Maulik Pancholy), and Buford (Bobby Gaylor) had the previous summer. The bell rings, there's a musical number — because there's always an upbeat musical number somewhere in each episode — and then a new summer begins. When we finally get Bowling for Soup to open the second episode, the theme song's lyrics now declare, 'There's another 104 days of summer vacation,' and everything else is otherwise the same. That holds true for the show. The kids are in theory a year older, but the only way to tell that is that some of the actors' voices have gotten deeper. (Martella is now in his thirties, and he re-recorded a few of his lines in the opening credits so they're more consistent with how Phineas sounds today; Ferb is now voiced by David Errigo Jr., but he speaks so infrequently that you'd barely notice.)
The show remains unapologetically self-aware. When Perry crashes into the Doofenshmirtz Evil, Inc., headquarters like usual to find out about his nemesis' latest scheme in the first episode, Doof admits, 'I know, today's -inator is a little basic. But I'm purposely starting slow.' And that classroom musical number includes Phineas acknowledging the high bar they set the previous summer, while insisting, 'I'm confident we can top ourselves somehow.'
The bar is, indeed, spectacularly high. The original run is one of the greatest kid/family/whatever animated comedies of all time. With one exception, there's not anything in the five episodes I've seen that I would put against the very best of the 2000s/2010s batch. But the fact that the series is able to return after a decade away (give or take Candace Against the Universe) and still feel like itself is a remarkable achievement.
The new episodes are much more of a piece from the final season or so, when the creative team was pushing harder against the boundaries of their formula, and focusing more on the supporting characters. There are several stories this time out that barely even feature Phineas and Ferb, including one that follows up on the idea that Candace's best friend Stacy (Kelly Hu) knows that Perry is really a secret agent(*). The best of this group (the one that belongs in the stratosphere of the original) is an even bigger experiment, where the kids build a giant zoetrope — which Buford dubs 'Tropey McTropeface' — and it goes off to have a delightful series of adventures that includes a romance with a local Ferris wheel, much of this accompanied by an unexpected special musical guest. It would be the weirdest new installment if it weren't for the one that turns a single joke from an old episode — that Buford for some reason has life-sized molds of all the other characters, for purposes unknown — into an entire plot, which at one point has Buford simultaneously wearing a Candace skin suit and a Linda skin suit. (Warning: You might have nightmares about that one later.) Mostly, though, Phineas and Ferb thankfully manages to still be Phineas and Ferb.
(*) For O.W.C.A., the Organization Without a Cool Acronym, where all the agents are animals wearing fedoras.
Later this summer, King of the Hill will return from an even longer hiatus with a season that will both age up the characters and explicitly deal with how the world has changed since that animated classic last appeared. Maybe that will work. But it's a relief to have something as funny, optimistic, joyous, and inventive as Phineas and Ferb back in our lives, acting as if barely any time at all has passed.
The first two episodes of the new Phineas and Ferb season debut tonight on Disney Channel, with additional episodes releasing weekly on Saturday mornings, while 10 episodes will begin streaming June 6 on Disney+. I've seen five episodes.
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