Exclusive Interview: Dan Povenmire & Jeff “Swampy” Marsh

PREMIUM: The creators of Phineas and Ferb offer World Screen Newsflash a glimpse behind the scenes of the hit animated series and talk about the reasons for its success.

When Phineas and Ferb premiered on Disney Channel, in August of 2007, its creators, Dan Povenmire and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh, did not know the animated series would become such a huge hit. But soon enough, the zany adventures of two schoolboys trying to find fun things to do during summer vacation, their annoying sister and pet platypus (who, unbeknownst to anyone, is a secret agent trying to foil the evil Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz) caught the imagination of kids. Since then the series has spun off video games, a live show and a Disney Channel original movie. In their inimitable way, Povenmire and Marsh talk about the success of the show.

WS: How did the idea for the show come about?
POVENMIRE: Swampy and I were writing a show together in 1993 and we wanted to continue to write together, so we were trying to come up with another show idea so we could do that.
MARSH: We thought, here’s a simple idea, we’ll create another show, sell the show and keep working together.
POVENMIRE: And then it just took 14 years. But I actually drew the first Phineas on some butcher paper on a table in a restaurant where they give you a little can of crayons to doodle with while you’re waiting for your food. I actually tore it out, took it home and brought it to work.

WS: What has made the show so successful?
POVENMIRE: We tried to make the show different from the other shows we were seeing on the air at the time. A lot of kids’ shows had a lot of mean humor, a lot of snarky humor.
MARSH: If they had a lesson at the end they always hit you over the head with it. We decided we should do something that’s really intelligent and wasn’t targeted at kids. We just made the show to make ourselves laugh and didn’t include anything we thought might be inappropriate.
POVENMIRE: We always try to just make it funny for ourselves and we’re big enough kids that I feel like most of the stuff that we laugh at, kids will laugh at too.

WS: How have you kept the show fresh season after season?
MARSH: We have a lot of help. We’ve got a crew that one could only dream of, and they have come up with so much stuff and taken our characters in places that, quite frankly, we never imagined when we first started the show. And that’s been really exciting and rewarding to see these characters that we created and watch people take them and really surprise you with them. We’re lucky.
POVENMIRE: I don’t think there is a finite number of ideas that any person has. I think that the more different ideas you come up with on a subject, you’re sort of stretching muscles and it becomes easier to come up with more ideas. When they first said we were doing 16 episodes for the first season, we thought, “Sixteen episodes? That’s like 32 stories. How are we gonna come up with 32 stories?” And now we’ve done almost 100 episodes, so it becomes easier as it goes.

TV KIDS: How important is it nowadays to offer kids content on more than just the TV screen?
POVENMIRE: It’s really important. Disney Interactive Studios released a [Phineas and Ferb] video game for the Wii system, Nintendo DS and PlayStation 3. A Disney live show opened in August, and we also did a Disney Channel original movie, Phineas and Ferb: Across the 2nd Dimension.
MARSH: What amazed me in the early days is how quickly all of this stuff started being shared on the Internet in all different forms. And I really thought I was fairly Internet savvy, but I realized there are avenues that kids have for sharing content with each other that I wasn’t aware of at all. I had no idea of the scope or size of this whole other world, and that was really exciting. We’re starting to see and now get to play with all these different digital avenues that kids have.

WS: Do all these different digital avenues influence or inform how you create the show or are you just thinking of doing the best story possible?
POVENMIRE: We’re just trying to make the best story possible, the way we would have done it had all this other stuff not been there, but it’s nice to know that that stuff is there for exploiting…for lack of a better word.
MARSH: On the smallest level, there are gags that we may have let go before but now [when we are pitching ideas] somebody will say, “Yeah, but that’s gonna end up on the Internet.” And you think, yeah, probably; let’s leave it in. It’s one of those quirky, weird clips that you just think, somebody’s gonna use that.

WS: There are a lot of songs in the show. I’ve read that the two of you come up with brief melodies and play them into the composer’s phone’s voice mail and then he takes it from there. How does that work?
POVENMIRE: In the early episodes we would write the songs on the guitar, which we still do, but we used to just call him up and say, “OK, don’t answer the phone, we’re gonna sing this into your voice mail.” And then we would send him chord charts and lyrics and he would just record from the voice mail into his computer and use that as the basis.
MARSH: No matter what we did it always sounded like a folk song, and usually at the end of the message we would say, “OK, that’s the song, but it should sound like Dean Martin meets the Clash.” [Laughs]

WS: And how do the songs get written now?
POVENMIRE: Now we usually sing it into GarageBand and actually send him an MP3, because then we have a copy of it.
MARSH: He accidentally erased a song one time.
POVENMIRE: And we had to re-figure out the song. We were like, Oh my God, we came up with that three weeks ago and we only played it that one night, so now we have to figure out the melody again.
MARSH: The nice thing is now we’ve recruited many of the other crew members who have some latent musical talent—and some who have some not-so-latent musical talent—to pitch in and write with us. So we’ve got a group of about four or five guys who are capable of pitching in on the songs, which has been a relief.

WS: How many writers do you have writing the episodes and how do you work with them?
MARSH: We have a group of four writers that help to generate outlines, which is kind of the bigger story idea.
POVENMIRE: And then we hand it off to a team of two story­board writers who storyboard it and write the actual dialogue and the gags and sometimes restructure the story a little—while they’re drawing it, which is different than most shows. We have six teams of two people each who take an episode and then we get the original writers back in with us. When they put [the storyboard] up on the wall and pitch it, we go through and see if anything needs to be punched up and we put Post-it notes up over dialogue and try to fix stuff that’s not working.
MARSH: By the end it’s just sort of a writer free-for-all.
POVENMIRE: It’s the closest thing to improv that you can do in animation.

WS: You work on more than one episode simultaneously?
POVENMIRE: Yeah, it takes about ten months to do an episode and we’re finishing an episode every week, so you can imagine how many different stages different episodes are in.

WS: How do you keep it all straight?
MARSH: We don’t. We get to meetings and pretend that we know what’s going on and halfway through somebody will clue us in. We have people that are pretty good about briefing us and letting us know and, yeah, sometimes you start out a meeting not being able to remember a story at all, but it isn’t too long before you pick it up and go, “Oh yeah, yeah, OK, now I remember where we’re going,” and you’re back into it pretty quickly.

WS: So could a subhead to the title The Making of Phineas and Ferb be Organized Chaos?
POVENMIRE: Yeah, it’s sort of like a big train wreck and you’re trying to keep it in the general vicinity of the tracks all the time. It’s like, “Oh no, I’m falling; no, I’m back up this way.”

WS: What do you enjoy most about your job?
POVENMIRE: Just coming to work every day and trying to make each other laugh. That’s what we would be doing if we were unemployed. “Hey, Swampy, why don’t you come over? We’ll draw some silly pictures.”
MARSH: I still get to work with him, something we tried for 14 years, and it’s awesome.