August 24th, 2020 
Jackson Murphy 
It’s been five years since Phineas and Ferb ended on Disney Channel. But the iconic animated series still airs on TV every day, and the episodes are now on Disney+. That’s also where you’ll find the fantastic new Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Candace Against the Universe, starting this Friday, August 28th.
I chatted with P&F creators Dan Povenmire and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh over Zoom last month. They’re EPs on the new film. I wore a P&F t-shirt and showed-off my PEZ dispensers of some of the characters: Phineas, Ferb, Candace, Perry the Platypus and Dr. Doofenshmirtz, who’s voiced by Povenmire. Marsh voices Major Monogram, who does not have a PEZ. That quickly became a topic of conversation.
Dan Povenmire: So Swampy, have you ever been jealous that you didn’t get a PEZ?
Jeff “Swampy” Marsh: Oh yeah. And not just a little. (laughs)
DP: I just realized that you’re the only one who’s not really represented there. You and Vanessa, I guess.
Jackson Murphy: Well there should be one. Maybe because of the movie, the PEZ people will put out even more characters. They like to do that with tie-ins.
DP: You should lobby for that, Swampy. I’ll back you up on that.
JM: Yes! Yes!
JSM: All that white hair.
DP: And you are looking much more like Monogram these days. You didn’t have the grey hair when we started.
JSM: I know!
I then jumped into talking about the movie, congratulating them on it.
DP: Thank you so much. We’re very, very proud of it. I think it’s one of the best things we’ve done.
JM: Yeah, I read that on your Twitter, Dan. You wrote a couple months ago that you think it’s one of the best things you’ve ever done. At what point did you realize that?
DP: Other people had said that early on in the process, and I was like, “We’ll see how it turns out!” (laughs) There’s still a lot of stuff I wanted to fix. But as they gave us enough time to really smooth out some rough edges and stuff like that… when we saw it all done, I cried. I was like, “Oh my God! I’m so emotional!” I think it’s really, really good.
JSM: In fairness, we’re an easy cry target. But we’ve seen this film 30 or 40 times at least. And the last time we watched it, I get to the end and I still get emotional. And I keep thinking to myself, “Dude! You’ve seen this countless times! Seriously?” But it’s okay.
Dan and Swampy
JM: You do get emotional at certain points during this movie because… you take a bit of a trip down memory lane. And I think for a franchise like this that’s been around for more than a decade – and so successful – you have the right to take a trip down memory lane.
DP: Yeah!
JM: Were they some of the most emotional parts for you guys in putting this new movie together?
DP: Yeah. We lived with these characters for 10 years. Day in and day out, all of our brains were going around those characters. When we ended it, Swampy and I wanted to do a finale and finish it and move on. But we’ve missed it for five years. When they brought it up, we were like, “Yeah – we would like to do that.” It’s like having your kids back from college, in a way. It was so much fun to play in that sandbox again. And we tried to put as much stuff in – as much jokes in for people who had seen the entire series and for kids who had maybe never seen it at all. This might be the first introduction to them to Phineas and Ferb. So we tried to serve all those masters.
JM: You absolutely succeed with that. As someone who watched pretty much the entire series, one of the things that impresses me about the movie is that the music is better than ever. The songs in this are so good!
DP: Oh, thank you. I always felt like there was this thing that we had to live up to on some of the best songs we had written on the series. I remember not feeling like we had quite done it for a long time. And then when I heard them all finished with the orchestra on them, suddenly I was like, “Oh no no – it is! I think that may be better!” But I think that’s how you make things better. You constantly think they’re not good enough, so you constantly are shaping them and making them better and better. But that’s how I think you do the best stuff. The best stuff you do you aren’t thrilled with while it’s happening – only thrilled with it afterwards.
JSM: I love that my son, who’s starting to write songs with his friends came to me and said, “You were right about the volume thing. The more you do it, the more you can write.” There’s not a finite well of creativity. It’s a muscle. And the more you exercise it, the better it gets. I just think the more we do this, the better we get at it!
JM: And all the self-aware humor and the references. They’re great, too. There’s a major theme here [in the plot] involving Candace. You’ve presented an interesting perspective because she really hasn’t gotten her due and she almost feels like a bother. Was this storyline always sort of in the back of your mind – “one day we’re gonna explore this other side”?
DP: Yeah – I like that we get to sort of really hit it. It’s always been important to us. If you don’t watch the whole series, it’s harder to see this. Candace is not trying to be mean. She’s not trying to be mean to her brothers. She just feels like, “If I build a rollercoaster in the backyard, I would get in trouble.” And Mom should see this, and the boys should get in trouble for it.
JSM: And shout-out to Jennifer Grey for helping to be the inspiration for it.
DP: Exactly. Our touchpoint for that was Jennifer Grey’s character in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. She doesn’t hate Ferris. She just gets pissed off that he gets away with stuff that she wouldn’t get away with. And that’s what Candace is, she’s sort of Jennifer Grey on steroids. It was nice for us to explore what that would do to her psyche – for her to fail over and over and over and over again. What is her summer really like?
JSM: We haven’t really explored things from her point of view in that way. And the other part of that that I think for us was fun to do is – Dan and I both like it when we have moments of genuine connection and love between characters who care about each other. And every time we do it, it’s some of the best moments in the show. And that’s the stuff that gets us choked up in the movie.
As I moved onto the next question (about Povenmire and Marsh returning to voice Dr. Doofenshmirtz and Major Monogram, respectively), they did a bit of their voices.
JM: I love hearing those. Thank you guys. Was it tough to get back into that mindframe at all?
DP: I think Doofenshmirtz is always on the tip of my tongue. He’s just under the surface, so it was very easy for me. Basically, I’m always trying NOT to become Doofenshmirtz.
JSM: Dan, for anytime you have to call Customer Service anywhere…
DP: I should always be Doofenshmirtz?
JSM: And just be surprised when people recognize it.
DP: (laughs)
JSM: We’ve done messages for kids all over the world.
JM: That’s very nice, guys. How have the past few months been in putting this all together during COVID?
DP: It was a little crazy. Disney had to sort of scramble and figure out how to give the editors the equipment they needed to edit from home.
JSM: We had to do pick-up lines.
DP: We had to record people from their own living rooms and closets. We saw the insides of a lot of people’s closets.
JSM: Some that we shouldn’t have seen. (laughs)
DP: It was an interesting exercise in production. We had overseas studios doing in-between animation that would get shut down while they still had art to do for us. And we would have to take some of those and put them in another studio. And they’d get a little bit into those scenes, and THEY’D get shut down. We had to keep moving things around. And eventually it all got done – even on time, which was impressive.
JSM: On the upside, Dan and I got to write our first song together over a FaceTime call.
DP: This is true! The last song in the movie that’s in the credits, is a song Swampy and I wrote on FaceTime during Quarantine. “Let’s take out the guitars and type here!”
JM: That’s great! And I know at one time, I think in July 2013, there was gonna be a Phineas and Ferb theatrical movie. But I feel like, especially since theaters are closed, this is as big as [the saga of P&F] is ever gonna get. The fact that it’s out in the summertime and for families to watch on Disney+ during this time, how does it make you feel?
JSM: It’s a time when everybody needs to laugh and smile and have a bunch of positive humor in their life.
DP: It’s very well timed for that. We’ve sort of got a captive audience, sadly. But also, I’m hearing that a lot of people in the 19-24 range who grew-up with Phineas are re-watching it on Disney+ because it sort of reminds them of their childhood, and there’s this nostalgia thing. I think it’s coming along at a time where people really need that humor, and we’re happy that it’s coming out at this time.
JM: I am too. There is a moment in this movie where you take things to take their base elements. Was that an idea from the beginning?
DP: That’s actually a gag from the original script that you were talking about – the 2013 script. It’s the only gag that we saved from our script. We had this scene, and I was like, “Wait – we could do that gag from… what draft of the movie was that from?” And we had to go back through the archives and find that scene. To me, it’s the ultimate meta joke: it’s the self-realization joke.
JSM: I love that self-awareness as long as… the temptation with a lot of the writers and board artists was to use that too much. We always like to keep it in small doses.
DP: Yeah. Exactly. You get one meta joke per 11 minutes! (laughs)
JSM: Or else you’re overdoing it.
JM: That “Space Adventure” theme is like a combination of “Star Trek” and “The Love Boat” theme.
DP: That “Space Adventure” theme is actually something we wrote for the series and then only used a little bit of it. When we had this in the script, Bob Bowen, our director said, “Do you have that piece of music?” I looked for it in my phone and I found the entire version and I was like, “Oh my God! I forgot we wrote this entire version. There’s a long version of this that actually exists!” And Bob was like, “Well I’m using that whole thing then!” It became this running joke in the movie. I was so pleased that we finally got you to use it.
JM: You mentioned a little bit earlier this song you wrote for the end credits (“We’re Back!”). And I was thinking, “Did you place it at the end because you wanna tease a little more down the line?”
DP (in all seriousness): I would like to think that we’ll do more of this at some point.
JSM: It’s a sneaky way for us to force… No, I’m kidding. (laughs)
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