"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 ]