Dan Povenmire & Jeff “Swampy” Marsh Talk Phineas and Ferb Revival

Phineas and Ferb hit the airwaves on Disney Channel in 2007, bringing kids into a wild animated summer vacation filled with the titular stepbrothers’ silly antics and crazy inventions. Four seasons ran through 2015, before the franchise went on a hiatus. It briefly returned in 2020 for an exclusive Disney+ movie, but now, five years later, the series is finally returning for a fifth season, filled with the antics and silliness familiar to fans of the beloved show.

While revivals often see updated character looks, animation styles or story updates, the new season of Phineas and Ferb strongly resembles the first four.

“We weren’t trying to do a different Phineas and Ferb show,” says Dan Povenmire, co-creator of the series. “We felt like everybody already loves Phineas and Ferb. And it was important to the executives. They said, ‘Look, we don’t think it’s broken. You don’t have to fix it. We just want more of this.’”

Povenmire and fellow co-creator Jeff “Swampy” Marsh worked with the writers’ room to ensure the new episodes felt the same. They peppered the season with what they call “evergreen” episodes that “follow a formula,” Povenmire says, but they also played with episodes and storylines that broke the mold.

As an example, Povenmire and Marsh point to one episode that spends its entirety following one of the boys’ inventions. “They invent a giant zoetrope—a big, spinny thing—and it turns on its side and rolls out of the yard just as mom’s coming home, and then we just follow it for the whole episode,” Povenmire explains. “It doesn’t have sentience but has its own hero’s journey. It’s sort of like Wilson the Volleyball in Cast Away. You felt that was a real character. We’ve done that with this non-sentient zoetrope just rolling around town. He gets his own song, solves crimes and falls in love with a Ferris wheel.”

The mention of an original song should come as no surprise—the initial four seasons featured plenty of catchy songs performed by the characters. From “Gitchee Gitchee Goo” and “Squirrels in My Pants” to “Busted” and “Backyard Beach,” earworms abounded in those first seasons. That’s not to mention, of course, the theme song, performed by Bowling For Soup.

“I’ve always said that Dan and I are genetically incapable of creating a show that doesn’t have music,” Marsh quips. “I’ve tried. It’s always been a failure.”

“Swampy and I always felt that putting a song in a cartoon is the closest thing you get to immortality because we still remember ‘sugar, ah, honey, honey’ from The Archies,” Povenmire says. “I don’t remember a single plot line from The Archies, but I remember several songs from The Archies. Once you get that in people’s heads… We’ll be long dead and there will still be people who, if you say, ‘There’s 104 days’ in front of them, will sing the rest of that song.”

(As someone in the prime demographic when Phineas and Ferb first aired, I can confirm that my brain did, in fact, complete that sentence—and then some.)

The zoetrope isn’t the only “character” who gets a song this season. There is what Povenmire describes as a “thrashy” song for the Fireside Girls, “a big Broadway show tune” for guest star Alan Cumming and so much more.

Cumming isn’t the only big-name guest star of the new season (or the only one to get their own song). Michael Bublé, Brendan Hunt, Megan Rapinoe, Cristo Fernández and Meghan Trainor are part of the packed lineup of guests who join series regulars Vincent Martella, Ashley Tisdale and David Errigo Jr., among others, for an episode or two.

Getting this kind of star talent—and so much of it—wasn’t too tricky at this point in the show’s arc. “The show is now well-known enough [that] even people who’ve never seen the show have at least heard of it,” Povenmire says. “That helps a lot. We just think, who would be the best person to do this? It’d be cool if we could get Alan Cumming. Do you think we could do that? Let’s ask. And then he does it!”

Some people even reach out to them first. Michael Bublé “found me on TikTok, and he told me what a huge fan he is of the show and [asked if] we could have lunch,” he says. “We had lunch, and he said, I would love to do anything with you guys.

“We often have trouble getting music acts to come in and perform because their label will say, Oh, no, we don’t do it for less than [X amount]. And there’s a very set amount that we’re allowed to pay for that. If you can strong-arm your label and say, No, no, this is something I want to do, we will write a song for you! [Bublé] was like, I will absolutely do that. So, we wrote a song, and he texted me and said, You would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in the meeting with my manager where I said that what I want to do at this point in my career is sing a song called ‘Tropey McTropeface’ for a cartoon.”

Marsh adds, “We’ve been really lucky, again, with the success of the show. It’s a well-loved show by adults and children, so most of the time, when we ask people, they say yes. Occasionally, no, but we get a lot of yeses. We just want to work with people we like, whose talents we admire and who are good folks.”

Writing songs and getting star talent attached were only part of the puzzle of putting together the fifth season. Planning for the story arc was slightly different from what it was for the first four, what with the advent of Disney+ since the last time the show aired. After season five premiered on Disney Channel yesterday, the first ten episodes dropped at once on Disney+ today, allowing for a binge model that wouldn’t have been possible the first time around.

“It’s a little weird,” Povenmire says. “TV is done so differently now than it was even ten years ago. For years and years—almost a century—it was done the same way. Cable came around with more channels, but it was still done the same way. Now, it’s not. We thought about that a little bit.”

It’s not necessarily a serialized show, so they didn’t have to worry about a big, overarching story that might affect viewing, Povenmire says. But half of the season dropping now and the other half dropping later gave them something new to consider.

“We did have to think, when is this [episode] coming out?” he says. “Is it going to be readily viewable before this one? Can we reference this before that? If we’re doing one that then plays into another one, is it in the same drop? You want to keep those around [each other]. Or do we get more out of waiting between the two to build up some anticipation?”

As to what they’re most excited for fans to see, they both rave about one in particular: “We have a Lord of the Flies episode with the Fireside Girls,” Povenmire says. “They’re usually so cooperative and sweet to each other, and it goes the wrong way. It’s one of my favorite things we’ve done.”