Dan Povenmire & Jeff “Swampy” Marsh

By Anna Carugati

Disney Channel and Disney XD’s hit animated comedy Phineas and Ferb features the adventures of two boys trying to find “creative” ways of filling their summer vacation days, while Perry the Platypus is working as a spy to foil the plotting of the evil Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz. To top it all off, almost every episode has a song, with titles like “Gitchee Gitchee Goo” and “Ain’t Got Rhythm.” The boys’ antics, the underground subterfuge and the songs all sprang from the fervent imaginations of creators Dan Povenmire and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh. The final episode of Phineas and Ferb aired this June, but Povenmire and Marsh are already at work on a new series, Milo Murphy’s Law. With their inimitable sense of humor they tell TV Kids about saying goodbye to the first series and their plans for their next one.

TV KIDS: Looking back on Phineas and Ferb, what made it so successful?
POVENMIRE: It’s two things. I think the songs had a lot to do with it. Whenever we talk to people they always feel like the songs are what hooked them in. But early on in the process there were decisions that Swampy and I made to keep the show really positive and not have characters ever motivated by meanness, making them respectful of their elders, and that really resonated with parents, whether they knew that was it or not. A lot of people have talked about and blogged about those things, so we know it’s gotten through. Others have said they had a nice feeling about the show. They feel happy that they watched it and that their children watched it. It helps when the parents are on board.
MARSH: And we always kept it smart. We always refused to dumb down any of the jokes. We always believed that kids were smarter than everybody gave them credit for and that was one of the first things we heard back from the fans and the parents: thank you for making a show that is smart. The music didn’t hurt either!

TV KIDS: Tell me about the music. You composed all the songs yourselves?
POVENMIRE: We would get in a room and get the chords and the melody all together on guitars and then we would sing it into the answering machine of our composer, who also produced all the songs. That worked well for the whole first season and then one time he accidentally erased one of the songs!
We don’t always remember the song. We learn it just long enough to sing it, we do the whole thing in about an hour, we get it to where we like it and then we sing it. But now we do it in GarageBand on our Mac. After that we never play it or sing it again, so if it’s a couple of weeks down the road and our composer says, I lost that thing that you did, we have to go in and re-write it.
MARSH: We have to look back at the sheets of scribbles and lyrics and hope we can piece it back together.

TV KIDS: The show has two levels of humor—one that kids can understand and the other for parents. Was that intentional? POVENMIRE: It was intentional only in that we would laugh at two levels of humor and we are just trying to make each other laugh. We never took anything away because we thought the kids wouldn’t get it, we just made sure we would put in jokes that the kids would get.
MARSH: We had a rule that if it was a joke for the adults and the kids wanted to know why it was funny, that conversation couldn’t be an uncomfortable one. So the jokes that were for the adults weren’t rude jokes or dirty jokes.
POVENMIRE: They were references to cultural things that the parents might get.

TV KIDS: Would you give some examples of the type of feedback you have gotten about the show?
POVENMIRE: We got some great letters from people. We got this wonderful letter from a lady whose kid never liked art class, he just wanted to go out and play. He was always belligerent in class and would only draw a line on a piece of paper because the teacher would tell him he had to. But she showed us these wonderful drawings that he would do in art class after he had watched Phineas and Ferb and that made us cry! The thing that we got the most, and we still get, and it makes me happy every time, is parents thanking us for making a show that they could watch with their kids and felt good about their kids watching. Early on I remember telling Swampy, looks like we somehow stumbled upon the Life Cereal of animation because it was something that the parents all thought was good for their kids and the kids all thought was cool! Had we set out to specifically do those two things, we could never have done them. It was a happy accident that we were able to hit both of those boxes.

TV KIDS: How did your creative partnership work? You did so much, you wrote, you drew the characters, you voiced two of them, you wrote songs—how did you juggle all of that and still find time to sleep?
POVENMIRE: We did it that way because we are control freaks.
MARSH: That’s a big part of it.
POVENMIRE: It was because we did it as though we were making a show with our friends in our garage, so everybody did what they could and what they wanted to do. And we just like doing all those things, so we arranged our production around us being able to take part in all those parts of the process. I didn’t sleep a lot for a couple of seasons. I was working from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. or midnight almost every day. And back then I also had a newborn at home, so I was getting up at 4:30 in the morning to do the middle-of-the-night feeding for my daughter. But I was in my early 40s, so I didn’t need a lot of sleep yet!

TV KIDS: Besides Phineas and Ferb, there are also one-hour specials connected to the series, so you haven’t completely said goodbye to the characters?
POVENMIRE: We haven’t completely said goodbye. There is a Doof and Perry-centric special called The O.W.C.A. Files, which we really like. Phineas and Ferb are in it, but only very briefly at the very end.

TV KIDS: Tell me about the upcoming new show, Milo Murphy’s Law.
POVENMIRE: Milo Murphy’s Law is about the great-great-great-great grandchild of the original Murphy from Murphy’s Law. In Milo’s whole life everything that can go wrong goes wrong around him. Instead of being upset or beaten down by this, he’s maintained a really positive outlook and that’s just the way his life is. He doesn’t think anything of it and he has developed all sorts of coping mechanisms. He has a backpack full of hazmat gloves and helmets and whatever you might need if some disaster happens. It’s just him going through his life in this weird prism of disaster.
MARSH: He thinks that it just makes his life more fun and interesting and exciting.

TV KIDS: What is the message to kids?
MARSH: [Management] thought we were going all negative on this one.
POVENMIRE: Yes, we are going all negative, nothing but horrible stuff happens and Milo’s very sad at the end of every episode.
MARSH: No, we’re not doing that.
POVENMIRE: Milo remains this absolute indefatigable optimist and the theme becomes optimism in the face of adversity.
MARSH: It’s about what you choose to do with what life throws at you. Either you look at it as an adventure or a chance to learn or it can defeat you. It’s your choice.

TV KIDS: When you are writing together, do you bounce ideas off of one another? Do you break stories together?
MARSH: My idea is…
POVENMIRE: NO!!! You can’t do that.
MARSH: There, that’s how it works! No, actually we have an amazing team of creative people around us, writers and storyboard guys, and everybody gets to come in and throw around ideas. That’s where we start: it’s the idea that makes you laugh or maybe even the one that everybody at first says, No, we couldn’t do that! And then you start building on it. You have to have faith in the people that you have brought on to help mold the show and give them the freedom to say stupid stuff and build the story.