Top 10 Things Only Adults Understand About Phineas and Ferb
"Phineas and Ferb" is just as much for adults. Welcome to MsMojo, and today we’re counting down our picks for the things grown-up fans of this show will likely have realized at some point!
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00:00 "Ah, Summer, welcome back."
00:02 *Explosion*
00:04 "Yeah, well that's to be expected."
00:06 Welcome to Ms. Mojo, and today we're counting down our picks for the things grown-up fans of this show will likely have realized at some point.
00:14 "Aren't you a little young to be a rollercoaster engineer?"
00:17 "Yes, yes I am."
00:19 Number 10, Phineas' personality change.
00:22 It's normal for a show's writers to learn more about a character as they keep putting them in different scenarios and developing their series.
00:29 In the case of Phineas Flynn, this is the most obvious when re-watching the first episode after seeing later ones.
00:36 "I was gonna go to the pool. You wanna go swimming?"
00:38 "Kind of in the middle of something here."
00:40 "Oh, right. Okay."
00:42 Where Phineas is generally optimistic almost to a fault throughout most of the series, in the first episode, we see a protagonist who was initially designed to have more of an edge.
00:52 "Mom says I'm in charge, conditionally."
00:54 "Whatever."
00:55 "Wait a minute, what are you doing?"
00:57 "Homework."
00:58 "It's summer."
00:59 "That's cool. You wait till the last minute then."
01:01 These lines are said to have been the remnants of the creator's initial pitch before Phineas' characterization morphed.
01:07 Still, that bite isn't all lost.
01:09 "Phineas, I'm not gonna get on that silly little tricycle."
01:12 "Candace, we're in a hurry. Just get on the trike and we'll go."
01:14 "There's no way I'm gonna-"
01:15 "Get on the trike!"
01:16 Number 9, they normalize a blended family.
01:19 "You boys have such active imagination. You must get it from your father."
01:23 Since the Phineas and Ferb's release, few kids' shows, let alone cartoons, featured blended families.
01:29 And the way the show presents the dynamic is so commendable.
01:32 The word "step" is used in the first episode a few times, but apart from that, we rarely hear it again.
01:38 "Hey Ferb."
01:39 "Does your stepbrother ever talk?"
01:42 "Ferb is more of a man of action."
01:45 Every blended family is different, but it's obvious the Flynn Fletchers are close.
01:49 "Dad, you look nervous."
01:51 "Of course not, I have full confidence in you."
01:54 Even though Candace spends the entire summer trying to bust her brothers, it's clear she cares for them a lot.
02:00 And she can be heard referring to the both of them as her "brothers", not her brother and stepbrother.
02:05 The same goes for when the kids refer to their parents.
02:08 This line at the end of the first episode summarizes it best.
02:11 "Well, a brother is a brother. But I couldn't have asked for a better one than Ferb. You know what I mean?"
02:16 Number 8, Candace is peak teenager.
02:21 "Despair speaking."
02:23 When we were kids, we saw Candace as a nuisance in Phineas and Ferb's grand schemes.
02:28 She seemed dramatic, petty, and vengeful. But these days, well, we sort of understand her.
02:34 "Hey Candace, everything okay?"
02:36 "Beat it, dweebs, I'm having a crisis!"
02:38 Sure, she's a bit more stressed than most teens, but she's also got plenty of the same worries.
02:43 Friendships, boys, self-image, and confidence are all topics we see Candace do her best to navigate.
02:50 There's even one episode where we see her go to extreme lengths to achieve what she's told is beautiful.
02:56 "So I can never be perfect. No matter what I do, I'll always be too edgy and too ugly!"
03:02 Though we're not in our teens anymore, she's somehow even more relatable now that we're older.
03:07 "How can I only have four friends, and one of them's my mom?"
03:10 Number 7. The age gap between Vanessa and Ferb
03:14 "Hey Ferb, you ready?"
03:17 "Hi Phineas!"
03:19 "Hi Nessa, where you guys going?"
03:21 "Oh, Ferb's taking me out for Ukrainian food."
03:23 The ages of characters isn't really something you think about as a kid.
03:27 And since we all knew Ferb had a crush on Vanessa when he was young,
03:30 it felt satisfying to see them get together in the flash-forward episode "Act Your Age."
03:35 "Hey, how's it going?"
03:46 But as some fans have pointed out, Vanessa is about six years older than Ferb.
03:51 Since Phineas and Ferb are deciding which college to attend in "Act Your Age,"
03:55 that should put them at around 18 years old, which would make Vanessa 24.
04:00 There's conflicting debate about whether that's an appropriate age difference,
04:04 but we'll just leave this entry at that.
04:06 "Hey Ferb, snap out of it. What happened back there?"
04:10 "I was weak."
04:13 Number 6. How difficult it is to write an original song every episode
04:18 "No I ain't got rhythm, said I ain't got rhythm, I ain't got rhythm."
04:25 "You're kidding me, right? You're kidding me. Don't you see what you were doing right then?"
04:30 "That's a wicked groove you were starting to move."
04:33 "Mister, you got rhythm times ten."
04:35 For any of you who write music, you know how difficult it can be to come up with something new.
04:40 Almost every single episode of this show has at least some musical number,
04:44 with some episodes having multiple.
04:46 And the craziest part is that a lot of them are straight bangers.
04:50 "I'll get ya, I'll get ya, and when I do you're gonna be busted. I don't wanna put the hurt on you,
04:58 but you better believe me when I tell you that I finally got the dirt on you, you're busted."
05:05 For a children's cartoon, the team really didn't have to go that hard, but they did, and we love them for it.
05:11 When artists so palpably love the work they do, it always translates in the final product,
05:17 and Phineas and Ferb is a great example.
05:19 "Chicka chicka chew up, never gonna stop, itchy itchy goo means that I love you."
05:25 Number 5. Summer has lasted way too long.
05:28 "See where that got me. I'm telling you, I'm dry, Perry the Platypus, dry,
05:32 and this summer just keeps going on and on, and it feels like it's been going on for like four years."
05:37 While kids are definitely aware of the length of their summer,
05:40 and also likely aware of the length of Phineas and Ferb's summer,
05:43 sometimes the duration of time that a show has been on air can evade us.
05:47 The cartoon officially premiered in 2008, and ran all the way until 2015,
05:53 which means Phineas, Ferb, and their friends had something like 8 years worth of summer.
05:58 "Our vacation is more than halfway over, and what have we accomplished?
06:02 Okay, so we built a roller coaster, we traveled through time twice, found Atlantis, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah,
06:07 see? We hardly done anything."
06:09 There are also 129 episodes, which is definitely more than 104 days of summer,
06:14 and that's before the 2024 reboot.
06:17 Did they manage to build more days of summer too? We wouldn't put it past them.
06:21 "Now that was an eventful day."
06:23 "That was an eventful summer."
06:25 "What was your favorite part, Phineas?"
06:27 "Of the summer?"
06:28 "Yeah, what was your favorite thing we built?"
06:29 "Memories."
06:32 Number 4. Dr. Doofenshmirtz broke his generational trauma cycle.
06:37 "Hey, Vanessa, did you do all this yourself?"
06:40 "Well, actually, my dad put it together."
06:42 Okay, so it doesn't necessarily take growing up to realize how poorly Doofenshmirtz has been treated his whole life.
06:49 His backstories come up often enough, each as devastating as the last, to make sure viewers are aware of that.
06:55 "I would stand for hours. All through the cold night, as the Spitzenhound howled, my only companion was the moon."
07:06 As an adult, however, we look past the jokes to understand that Dr. Doofenshmirtz was straight-up abused.
07:12 His parents didn't even show up to his own birth. If that's not neglect, we don't know what is.
07:17 It's no wonder he dedicated his life to evil.
07:20 Despite all that, he grew up to be a devoted father who always made sure his daughter knew she was loved.
07:27 "Remember how you said if I got you a little Mary McGuffin doll, I'd be the world's greatest dad?"
07:32 "Yeah, when I was like seven."
07:33 "At long last, I have found one!"
07:35 Embarrassing or not, Doof always made sure to look out for Vanessa.
07:39 "Maybe you're not so bad a dad after all."
07:43 Number 3. The Formula
07:45 Long-time fans will probably have noticed this, and will probably also have realized it's exactly what made the series so successful.
07:52 "Mom, mom, quick, mom, look, before it disappears!"
07:55 "Well, if it isn't the welcoming committee."
07:57 Most episodes comprise three separate stories.
08:00 The A story, which revolves around Phineas and Ferb and what they're building.
08:04 The B story, which follows Candace and Mom.
08:07 And the C story, which follows Dr. Doof and Schmertz and Perry.
08:10 There are, of course, some exceptions to this.
08:13 But the majority of episodes cut back and forth between those three narratives in a very formulaic way.
08:19 With the destruction of Doof's innater typically leading to the disappearance of the boys' build.
08:24 "Don't you get tired of this?"
08:26 "What do you mean?"
08:27 "The same old routine, every day."
08:30 "Doesn't it ever get, I don't know, boring?"
08:33 This formula actually makes it so, paradoxically, the writers get to express a lot of creativity.
08:39 It also means we get to look forward to our favorite catchphrases every episode.
08:43 "Whatcha doin'?"
08:45 "Whatcha doin'?"
08:46 "Come into the Phineas and Ferb studios and we'll show you."
08:49 "Hey Isabella, about that 'whatcha doin' back there."
08:52 "Up, up, up, we'll talk about it later."
08:54 Number two, there's no real villain.
08:57 "What, I'm evil? I am evil!"
08:59 "No, Dad, you're basically a nice guy who's pretending to be evil."
09:03 "And, you know, it seems like it's all out of obligation to your backstories, not something that truly comes from your heart."
09:09 While Dr. Doofenshmirtz technically plays the role of the villain, it's clear from the very beginning that he's not much of a threat.
09:16 "I, Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz, have covered the entire eastern seaboard in tinfoil!"
09:22 Well, except for that one time he was, but we digress.
09:25 Where Candace might be seen as trying to foil the boys' fun, she really isn't all that antagonistic either.
09:32 And she never succeeds in busting her brothers.
09:34 Well, except for that one time she did.
09:36 "Hi, Mom, check it out, the flying car of the future, today!"
09:40 "Is that my car?"
09:43 "She sees the car too!"
09:45 Once again, we digress.
09:50 With that said, it's interesting to see a show without a true villain work so well.
09:55 The real conflicts seem to lie in Man vs. Fate for Candace, and Man vs. Self in Doofenshmirtz's case.
10:02 But now we're just dissecting a children's cartoon.
10:05 "If I get it wrong this afternoon, I'll get it right today when tomorrow is this morning again!"
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10:31 "Number 1. Just how funny it is."
10:35 While the target audience is children, the show barely acts it.
10:40 "Will you call it with the noise, Barry the Platypus? I've got a splitting headache!"
10:44 "I was at this evil mixer until late last night. It was crazy."
10:48 There is so much humor geared towards an older audience infused in each episode,
10:53 which is probably why the series has garnered such a massive adult fanbase.
10:57 "Right, racers! Status check!"
11:00 "Saturn check!"
11:01 "Keranos check!"
11:02 "Wilford, that is not how it is pronounced!"
11:04 "It is on this channel!"
11:06 Take the Infidelity episode with Peter the Panda.
11:09 That's just a taste of the sort of scenarios that take place in the series.
11:13 Plus, every time we re-watch, we catch a sly joke we missed the first time around.
11:18 From physical comedy to tongue-in-cheek humor and hysterical one-liners,
11:23 there really is something for everyone, no matter the age.
11:27 "It sure would be helpful if they could just make the days a little longer. Who do I call about that?"
11:32 "Hey, do you mind? We have a visual gag going on here. Thank you."
11:37 What line or tidbit in the show did you understand only when re-watching as an adult?
11:42 Let us know in the comments.
11:43 "Turn down the thrusters!"
11:45 "This must be a special episode. He's yelling at his sister again."
11:48 Do you agree with our picks?
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11:56 [ ♪ Outro ]