After being away for a decade, the popular animated series “Phineas and Ferb” returns for Season 5 with an entire class full of kids ready for summer vacation: the titular step-brothers Phineas and Ferb, who inventively turn summertime into thrilling adventures; jealous older sister Candace; mad scientist Doofenshmirtz; and secret agent Perry the Platypus, who outwits Doofenshmirtz.
Picking up a year after they left off in 2015, not much has changed. Phineas’ orange and white T-shirt now has an extra stripe to make him appear taller, and Doofenshmirtz updates his social media status to “Evil Again.” But that’s part of the charm of “Phineas and Ferb.” The show has a charming, intelligent, still kid-focused style of comedy that is about bringing out the essential goodness and creativity in people. It was really a no-brainer for Disney to resurrect the series with a new 40-episode order, split into two seasons. The show has remained in the top 10 of most-watched animated kids’ series on streaming platforms since its departure.
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The voice cast is back, including Vincent Martella as Phineas, David Errigo Jr. as Ferb, Ashley Tisdale as Candace, Caroline Rhea as Linda, their mom, Dee Bradley Baker as Perry/Agent P.
Yet returning after a decade was daunting at first for creators Dan Povenmire and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh, who also voice Doofenshmirtz and Major Francis Monogram, to whom Perry reports. “It was a little weird because we left off at the end of summer,” Povenmire told IndieWire. “And so are we gonna do this in school? And I was like, well, let’s just do it the next summer. Everybody will be one year older, and they won’t look any different. But we’ll put [a fourth stripe] on Phineas’ shirt, and that’ll give the illusion that he’s taller. But we’ll start the show off in school as a fake-out to the fans. And then we realize it’s the last day of that school year, so we have another 104 days of summer vacation.”
The real worry was getting back into the writer’s room and not having enough fresh ideas to sustain the new season. “It’s been exactly the opposite. We have more new ideas than we know what to do with,” Marsh told IndieWire. “All of the writers that we had from the original group who are back have had all this time to think of things that they would’ve liked to have done in the show. And all the young writers bring in this energy because they grew up with the show, and it’s just been this free-for-all.”
The new 10-episode season kicks off with a summer block party that gets ruined by Doofenshmirtz’s latest invention, the Vaporizer-inator, which eliminates everything he finds annoying. Another episode includes a never-ending luge track created by Phineas and Ferb to combat the heat, only to find Doofenshmirtz immersing the local water park in Doonkelberry oil.
Season 5, though, introduces a new art director, Nadia Vurbenova (“Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?”), along with a new workflow. Storyboards are done digitally in Storyboard Pro, and artists draw on Cintiq tablets, which is much quicker and more efficient. All of the main poses are animated locally while the in-betweening is done at Snipple Animation in the Philippines. Overall, the animation is more polished-looking.
”We still make sure that the storyboard artists and the directors are able to bring more stuff to it and change things as they need,” added Povenmire. “If they find better solutions or funnier solutions, they still have the ability to do that. We’re just giving them much more information upfront, so it avoids the problem you get when people find something funny and take a left turn down a path and they’ve gone too far.”
But the biggest change is that the series is script-driven rather than storyboard-driven, which has resulted in some nice surprises. For example, in “Deconstructing Doof,” Doofenshmirtz and Candace both go to the same therapist. This, the creators believe, will become an instant fan favorite. Another is “Lord of the Firesides,” in which the girl scout-like organization called the Firesides are put into a bizarre “Lord of the Flies”-like situation.
Then there are a couple of episodes, including “The Candace Suit,” inspired by a throwaway joke in an earlier season about bully Buford (Bobby Gaylor) making life-size molds of everyone he knows. “This is where they make all these suits of Candace trying to fool people and different people are wearing them,” Marsh said. “And, of course, their shapes are not the same size. Buford puts one on and he has to have a broom handle to hold up her head because he’s only in the bottom half of her. It’s one of the funniest and most disturbing episodes.”
Fans have also requested another episode with Meap, the alien, who got teased in a fake trailer for an episode the creators never intended to make. But they get their wish in Season 5 with “Meap Me in St. Louis.” “We just took all the scenes from the trailer and just back-engineered this weird story,” Povenmire said. “The challenge is to take a scene from the trailer that looks like it means one thing and have it mean something else, having fun with the visuals. Like we have one of the characters coming into these doors of what looks like a church with stained glass on them. But use that graphic for something else.”
The greatest fun this season, though, was devoting episodes to other characters to expand the storytelling. “We have Buford wake up on a deserted island in a bread bowl hot tub and he has to make his way back to the mainland,” added Povenmire. “Or seeing what Baljeet and Irving do for a day, or have Candace and her mom go off on their own adventure. Or Stacy, who’s Candace’s best friend, has never had an episode, and now she does. We’re having a fun time coming up with new preposterous plots.”
“Phineas and Ferb” is now streaming on Disney+.
