Writing Wednesday: I know what we're going to write today
I just finished all of my classes for the semester!! I re-wrote two pieces for my Creative Non-Fiction class (the essay on Pokemon and an exercise on my obstacles in becoming an animation screenwriter), and wrote a bonus essay for honors credit. I didn't have a lot of time or energy left to do it so I picked a topic I love and knew I could write a lot about in a short amount of time: Phineas & Ferb.
When I saw the first commercials for Disney Channel’s cartoon Phineas & Ferb, the premise appeared unremarkable: a teenage girl was convinced her little brothers were doing something wrong and tried to get them in trouble with their mother, but they always outsmarted her plans. The seemingly mediocre plot kept me from tuning in to the show for a long time but I knew people my age who enjoyed it, so I tried watching a few minutes of it while channel surfing. Then a few more minutes. Then whole episodes and afternoon-long binges. The show was surprisingly clever and charming and it won me over fast and has dominated the title of “My Favorite TV Show” for about two years now.
The plot of the show is far more complex than the commercials lead you to believe. Phineas and Ferb are two step-brothers at the end of their elementary school years and this is their summer vacation. Instead of being locked into the schedule of a summer camp or languishing in purposeless hours spent in front of the TV set, their goal is to spend every day building something new. Not blanket forts or cardboard box robots but massive structures that break the laws of time and space. In the first episode, it’s a rollercoaster that runs through downtown and back. Then a spaceship, a shrinking submarine to go inside a friend’s dog, and a derby of full-size race cars (remote-control of course, they are only kids). Even when their day doesn’t involve an invention, their activities are still extraordinary, such as reuniting an old rock band to play for their parents or painting their sister’s face on Mount Rushmore for her birthday. Their genius accomplishments are never a form of mischief or showing off, just a way to have fun, help their friends and family, and live up to their motto of “carpe diem.”
The only person who finds a problem in these projects is their neurotic sister Candace, who spends every episode trying to “bust” the boys to their mother but through various mishaps whatever they build disappears before Mom can see it. She loves and appreciates her brothers and acts less out of jealousy and more out of concern (paired with a tiny bit of annoyance at their precociousness) and the need to prove that she isn’t a liar or a lunatic for claiming she has seen these things. She also harbors an intense crush on a sweet neighbor boy named Jeremy, and often has to fight her urge to rush home and bust the boys when she’s out on a date.
The third storyline of the show stars the family’s pet platypus Perry, who puts on a fedora every morning and sneaks off into his underground spy lair to receive orders from a man on a computer screen. Perry’s one job as secret agent is to stop the schemes of the mad scientist Dr. Doofenshmirtz who seeks to take over the tri-state area, but just as often his plots are directed at petty goals like embarrassing his brother, getting a free pizza, or sucking the water out of a neighbor’s plants so that his own look healthier by comparison. His schemes involve devices that are always named with the suffix “-inator” and usually take the form of a large laser, and after a scuffle with a Perry, are accidentally shot off into the distance where they inevitably collide with whatever Phineas and Ferb built that day, causing the mysterious disappearances.
That last component is what surprised me the most -- the commercials never let on that half of the show was a “semi-aquatic egg-laying mammal of action” leading a double life of being a simpleton pet and a sparring partner/weird best friend to a divorced middle-aged man in a lab coat who just wants attention, and that this storyline fits in perfectly with that of the main family. They didn’t tell me that Candace truly loves her brothers and they love her back and that their parents are just as quirky and adorable. They didn’t introduce me to the boys’ sassy, stereotype-breaking best friends: the take-charge girl-next-door, the confident nerd, the affectionate bully. They didn’t let me know about the catchy, clever musical numbers in every episode, or the surreal running joke of the Giant Floating Baby Head, or the loving homages to every piece of pop culture from The Lord of the Rings to 2001: A Space Odyssey. And they didn’t make me aware of the show’s structural brilliance, where every episode is some variation on building, busting, and battling, using the same plot points and even lines of dialogue over and over again to create dozens of varied and entertaining stories from the same narrative blueprint.
What makes Phineas & Ferb so amazing are the elements that don’t come across in promotions. The advertising isn’t false, it just can’t begin to describe the bizarre complexity of this show in only thirty seconds. It’s nothing like you would expect it to be, and it keeps surprising even seasoned fans and will keep any attentive audience member coming back for more.