The Untold Truth Of Phineas And Ferb

"There's 104 days of summer vacation," so went the Phineas and Ferb theme song, and "there's a whole lot of stuff to do before school starts." That's the premise, in a nutshell of the 2007–2015 Disney Channel series. 

Over the course of the show, Chatty Phineas (voiced by Vincent Martella) and his quiet stepbrother, Ferb (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), aimed to make the most of every day of their summer break by planning and executing their ambitious "Big Ideas." At various times, they built a biosphere, made shoes that provided cheetah-like speed, searched for the "Lake Nose Monster," and built an animal translator — just your average summer kid stuff. Older sister Candace (Ashley Tisdale) forever tried to bust them, but much to her frustration, evidence of their tomfoolery always dissipated before the parental units showed up. Meanwhile, the kids had no idea that their pet platypus, Perry, had a secret life as a secret agent, forever spoiling the efforts of the evil Dr. Doofenshmirtz to cause chaos throughout "the Tri-State Area." 

Phineas and Ferb was a big world of big fun, and here's everything you might not have known about the beloved series.

One night in the mid-'90s, artist-turned-writer Dan Povenmire drew a triangle-headed kid with huge eyes on some butcher paper acting as a tablecloth at a restaurant in Pasadena, California. And lo, Phineas was born, and when Povenmire showed the character to his Rocko's Modern Life writing partner, Jeff "Swampy" Marsh, the pair excitedly developed an entire fictional universe that would become the pitch for Phineas and Ferb. Povenmire and Marsh then tried to sell it to various TV outlets ... and failed.  "We pitched it to four different places. We'd get real close, they'd say no, so we'd put it back on the shelf for a couple of years," Povenmire told Animation World Network. Years passed, and Marsh moved to England, and Povenmire took a job on Family Guy. Then, one day in the 2000s, Disney called Povenmire to tell him that they'd changed their mind and would like to make Phineas and Ferb into a show. When the series premiered in late 2007, nearly 16 years had passed since Povenmire made his first drawing in that restaurant.

Of all the countless shows in TV history about the lives of kids — both animated and live-action — they've almost exclusively focused on the characters' exploits at school. For example, there's Doug, Hey Arnold!, Saved by the Bell, Degrassi, and the list goes on. Phineas and Ferb is the rare, refreshing example of a show about kids that takes place during the summer. In fact, it's set exclusively in the summer, and just one summer at that, as the series' entire run plays out over a single span of "104 days of summer vacation." And that was creators Dan Povenmire and Jeff "Swampy" Marsh's "Big Idea." 

"The whole thing came about because we didn't want to deal with school," Marsh told Animation World Network. "We've seen it over and over again in too many shows — there's nothing fresh to it." So, he and Povenmire thought about their memorable childhood summers, as opposed to the routine drudgery of school. "We remember growing up being kids. Every summer day we'd go out and do something: dig a trench, or build a tunnel, fort, or a tree house." Beyond that, the show was meant to pay homage to a less technologically-oriented time period. "We grew up in a time when there was minimal TV and no video games," Marsh told Variety 411. And as Povenmire explained, "We wanted to do a show that celebrated a kid's imagination."

Probably because they don't have to operate through a lens of realism, cartoons can be as visually zany as they like. Characters are often caricatures and don't look anything like real living beings. Actual mice don't look like Mickey Mouse, humans aren't four-fingered and yellow skinned like The Simpsons, and the shapes of the characters' heads and bodies on Phineas and Ferb don't appear anywhere in the natural world. 

That's a specific choice, based on a style philosophy that co-creator Dan Povenmire says he learned from Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons (where he once worked). "All the main characters are based on geometric shapes. Phineas is a triangle, Ferb is a rectangle, Candace and Isabella are half circles," Povenmire told Variety 411. "We tried to create characters that kids would easily be able to draw themselves.  We also created characters that would be very recognizable even from a distance. Matt Groening once said that when you are designing characters, they should be recognizable in silhouette."

As for the show's unique color palette, co-creator Jeff "Swampy" Marsh explained, "The idea at the end of the day was candy. The characters are so bright and candy-colored, and our backgrounds are a much more realistic depiction of the world: the soft green of the grass, the natural woods for the fence. In order for all of the stuff that they do to work, their world needs to be grounded in reality."

Most animated shows are produced in the same way. Generally speaking, the writers write scripts, and then storyboard artists draw a series of panels based on those scripts, which are then turned into an animated final product. But that isn't how Phineas and Ferb operated. Instead, the staff and storyboard artists worked simultaneously. Co-creator Dan Povenmire told Slate that he utilized that method because it's how it was done on his previous show, Rocko's Modern Life. But why? Well, it evidently leads to more and better visual jokes, which is important on a show with two virtually silent main characters (Ferb and Perry the Platypus). "If you want a lot of visual humor, the way to do it is have visual people do it," Povenmire said. "Ferb and Perry would have just disappeared in scripts."

One of the funniest (and bizarre) running jokes across the series was the sudden appearance of the smiling head of a baby ... only gigantic and disembodied. That's the result of the freewheeling visual storytelling process. As Povenmire told the St. Petersburg Times, the head "came from one board panel drawn by Mike Diederich, and one of our directors, Rob Hughes, thought it was hilarious and made a whole bit about it." Sure, but what does this weird gag actually mean? "We try not to think too much about the floating baby head," Marsh added. "It makes us laugh, 'nuff said."

While one Phineas and Ferb spinoff, Take Two, aired from 2010 to 2011, it didn't exactly set the world on fire. But it got far more of a chance than a couple of other potential Phineas and Ferb offshoots received. In 2010, The New York Times reported that Disney was considering a spinoff about the Danville chapter of the Fireside Girls, those intrepid Girl Scout-like youngsters (Milly, Katie, Ginger, Gretchen, Holly, Adyson, Isabella, et al.) who frequently helped Phineas and Ferb execute their grand and absurd plans. That project, unfortunately, never became a standalone series.

Five years later, around the time that Phineas and Ferb aired its series finale, Disney announced a fall premiere date of The O.W.C.A. Files, a one-hour special about Agent P (Perry the Platypus) and his fellow operatives at the "Organization Without a Cool Acronym." This spinoff special is the only episode of The O.W.C.A Files to ever exist.