EXCLUSIVE: The Cast & Creators of ‘Phineas & Ferb” Talk Returning For Another Round

The cast and creators of Phineas and Ferb came together to speak to press about the new season of their hit Disney show.Dan Povenmire (Co-Creator and EP, “Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz”), Jeff “Swampy” Marsh (Co-Creator and EP, “Major Francis Monogram”), Ashley Tisdale (“Candace Flynn”), Caroline Rhea (“Linda Flynn-Fletcher”), Vincent Martella (“Phineas Flynn”), David Errigo Jr. (“Ferb Fletcher”), Alyson Stoner (“Isabella Garcia-Shapiro”), and Dee Bradley Baker (“Perry the Platypus/Agent P”) were all on hand to tease what’s to come this season, returning to play these characters and so much more.

Which one of you would mostly likely go on a real summer adventure and who would immediately try to take a nap instead and relax all summer?

Dan Povenmire: “It depends on what the fall has been like, I think.”

Alyson Stoner: “I think Dan might take a nap, but he would make sure to get good content of it to post on his TikTok.”

Dan Povenmire: “Yes. That’s exactly it.”

Vincent Martella: “He’d ask me to film his entire nap.”

David Errigo, Jr.: “I’m pretty confident I’d be a napper.”

Caroline Rhea: “I would go on a summer vacation in Brazil and have Vincent act like a king and take me everywhere.”

David Errigo, Jr.: “The most famous man in Brazil”

Caroline Rhea: “Most famous man in Brazil, my son Phineas.”

Vincent Martella: “We all have to go to Brazil together.”

Dan Povenmire: “We went to Brazil for D23 with Vincent and following him around felt like being in Justin Timberlake’s entourage. He is so famous there.”

Caroline Rhea: “It’s like following you around in Disneyland, Dan.”

Dan Povenmire: “No, trust me, Caroline, it’s not.”

Caroline Rhea: “Really?”

Swampy Marsh: “No.”

Dan Povenmire: “Yes, I can go to Disneyland with security. Vincent cannot walk the streets of Brazil without security.”

Vincent Martella: “It was the first time they did D23 in Brazil. It was in Sao Paolo, and it was really, really awesome. I mean, the fans were incredible, they were really excited about the show. They sang the whole theme song in English too, and they were really excited about the show. They weren’t just excited about me.”

Dan Povenmire: “They were more excited about you.”

Swampy Marsh: “So, if we wanted to have a big summer adventure and not take a nap, the place to go would be Brazil with Vincent, ’cause you’d never get any rest.”

David Errigo, Jr.: There you go.

 

Dan and Jef, how did you balance bringing the show to a new audience while also maintaining what was loved about the original run?

Dan Povenmire: “Well, we really just wanted to make more of the same show. We tried not to make it feel different, but we wanted it to have a fresh energy. About half the writers’ room are writers who were originally on the show and half the writers’ room are young writers who grow up watching the show. The people who had a break from the show for a while all came in with great new ideas. There’s a bunch of stuff that was like ‘Oh, why didn’t we ever think of doing this back in the day?” So, we’re just trying to keep the feel of the show, ’cause that’s what I think the fans love about it.”

Swampy Marsh: “We didn’t want to reinvent everything. It was working fine before, and we just thought we should just keep doing what we’ve been doing. Fortunately, Disney…”

Caroline Rhea: “And you were never right about the number of days, right? So, it doesn’t matter if now there’s 208 days of summer.

Swampy Marsh: “It does not.”

Dan Povenmire: “We checked that information. 104 days was just something somebody said in a meeting that sounded like they knew what they are talking about, and I never went and looked it up.”

Vincent Martella: “And then it worked really well in the theme song.”

Swampy Marsh: “It sings well.”

Vincent Martella: “It sings really well.”

Dan Povenmire: “Yeah, it sings well, so we didn’t change it when we found out there’s only, like, 80.”

David Errigo, Jr.: And how many of the things that you didn’t check actually turned out well, right? Like the color of a platypus under a black light or something like that? Isn’t that, like, something— ‘Oh, we didn’t check that, but, uh, we willed it into existence.’”

Dan Povenmire: “We willed it into existence in 2020. David’s talking about 2020, they found out, the entire scientific community found out that if you put a platypus under UV light, they glow the color of Perry the Platypus. They glow that exact teal.”

David Errigo, Jr.: “But only if they’re wearing a fedora.”

Dan Povenmire: “It’s the strangest thing that’s ever happened in my life.”

Caroline Rhea: “Seriously?”

Dan Povenmire: “Yeah, no, they look like this. They look like this under a black light.”

Swampy Marsh: “The color of that guitar.”

Dan Povenmire: “Yes. This is it. This is what they look like. They have recently found that a lot of animals have biofluorescence, not just bioluminescence.”

Vincent Martella: “Who doesn’t?”

Dan Povenmire: “That they’re different colors under- so they’ve started doing this. And- and platypuses look like Perry the Platypus in- in UV light.”

 

What’s it like returning to play these characters?

Dan Povenmire: “Well, we’ve always been doing it a little bit. I think we’ve all sort of done stuff for the Chibiverse and for interstitials, right?”

Vincent Martella: “Yeah, I’ve played Phineas for 17, 18 years now, so Phineas has been a huge, huge part of my life, and what’s wonderful about this show is that it has such an incredible audience. We’ve always had reasons to play these characters again, even in between the period where we stopped doing the episodes of the show and when we did the feature film in 2020, Candace Against the Universe, because we also did crossover episodes with Milo Murphy’s Law, where I got to play Phineas again for that. I’ve worked on the Chibiverse, which is also on Disney, a channel on Disney+. And so, Phineas has never been too far away, but the first record that I ever had coming back to do new episodes of the show was definitely, like, an emotional experience. I was really, really moved and excited because like I said, I mean, 17, 18 years is a really long time to do anything or to know someone, and I’ve known all these, you know, these wonderful people I get to work with and I’ve known this character for so long. So, it’s been really, really fun getting to be back doing this job every week. I hope we get to forever; it’s been amazing.”

Dee Bradley Baker: “I had to do a three-month deep dive to really try to recreate the essence and the subtextual context that I need to bring the Perry sound into life, so.”

David Errigo, Jr.: “And that’s actually a quote, like open quotations, D-E-E closed quote, P dive. That’s a Dee-p dive.”

Caroline Rhea: “You know what’s really fun? When we started this, I think it was 2008 that we went on the air. And my daughter had not been born yet, and now my daughter is 16, and so it’s very fun playing Mom talking to someone—now Candace is a whole different person to me. And now I know this person in three dimensions. Isn’t it weird, Ashley, now that you have kids, doing it too?”

Ashley Tisdale: “Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that it’s funny. We were in the studio the other day doing press, and Vincent was doing a little IG story And, he did his voice, and he showed Dan doing his voice and he’s like ‘And Swampy’s here,’ and he did his voice, and then he came to me and I just said, ‘Hi.’ Literally Candace is my voice. The only difficult thing is Candace’s craziness has so much energy. So, when I was younger, it was so easy to tap into that.

Obviously, I’m older and I have two kids, and to be honest, the whole season, last season I was pregnant with my second. And all I kept thinking was, ‘I really hope this baby understands this is not real life outside!’ I could only imagine her in my womb being like, “What is happening out there?’”

Dan Povenmire: “Yeah, ‘My mom is really high-strung!’”

Caroline Rhea: “Your daughter was watching episodes from the womb. I know we’re not supposed to do an aside, but you’re so brilliant as Candace and that’s been so much fun watching episodes. I mean, everybody is great.”

Ashley Tisdale: “Oh. It was really funny too, actually the other day I thought I was pulling one over Dan and Swampy and I said to Vincent, I said, ‘You know, I never read a script before I come into work.’ And Vincent goes, What?’ And I was like ‘I’ve never prepared a script. Like, I never read the script, I always just came in.’ And I still do today. I just come in and I start reading the lines. And I was like ‘Dan and Swampy didn’t know that’ and Dan goes, Yeah, we did!’ I thought I was pulling one over on them.”

Swampy Marsh: “It didn’t matter because it worked so well. There’s no way we were gonna mess with it. I don’t care how you get there.”

Ashley Tisdale: “It’s the genius of the character.”

Swampy Marsh: “It’s fantastic. We’re just gonna let it go.”

David Errigo, Jr.: “And I’m just thrilled to be involved with this wonderful family of people, to have been invited in to play. Getting to come back to it after a couple little things in between and now to be a part of the series, I thank my lucky stars.”

Caroline Rhea: “Now you’re fully adopted by the family. Like, we’re signed. You’re our first.”

Dee Bradley Baker: “You’re absorbed.”

Swampy Marsh: “All the legal papers have gone through. What I think is funny, especially with Alyson and Vincent, when we started with them, they were…”

Dan Povenmire: “They were kids.”

Swampy Marsh: “Kids, little kids. And now they’re fully grown people and all that, and somebody said, ‘Are you gonna be able to have the same actors back to do the voices?’ and it’s like, they’ve been doing it the whole time. They’ll probably be doing it long after I’m gone.”

Caroline Rhea: “There’s 2,001 million days of summer vacation.”

 

How does it feel to put out something that brings comedic relief to so many people around the world?

Dan Povenmire: “Well, that was something we decided early on, what is this show really gonna be? We wanted it to be a super-positive show, and we even made this decision not to have anybody ever motivated by meanness, to never have Phineas and Ferb trying to get away with something. There’s never any subterfuge on their parts. It was a harder way to get comedy because a lot of the writers we would hire, they’d been on a lot of shows where the easiest place to go for comedy is to mean or to be shocking or to be negative. And when we took those tools out of their tool chest, it was a little confusing for them for a bit but we felt like it’ll be a more interesting show if we don’t do the easy laugh, if we try to make people laugh without using the easiest things in the toolbox.”

Swampy Marsh: “And we’ve heard from almost every single person who’s ever written on the show that it’s the hardest show they’ve ever written on because of that. But also, the most rewarding and the most fun. Because it eliminates the easy solution that you’re used to, and so you really have to think and be clever.”

Dee Bradley Baker: “And I think that’s a lot of what people respond to and why they love the show so much. It’s authentically positive. It’s not inane, it’s smart. And it’s human and it’s positive, and people believe in that. They need that, they want that, and this show just delivers it so beautifully.”

Dan Povenmire: “I think that is why it took us so long to find our Phineas. Vincent was like the last person cast, ’cause we had gone through a whole bunch of people, and we’d try to describe the character to people and they would put on this positive sort of sounding voice. But it always sounds like it was put on and therefore masking some real negativity somewhere, and we just wanted somebody who sounded genuinely happy about everything. And Vincent came in, and as soon as we heard his voice next to that drawing, we were like ‘Finally.’”

Swampy Marsh: “It was the specific line in the pilot episode where the guy says, ‘Aren’t you a little young to be a rollercoaster engineer?” And when you hear Vincent say it, it sounds like ‘Oh, thank you for noticing.’ And everybody else who said it sounded like “’Yeah, screw you.’” You know, it just sounded cocky and arrogant. And Vincent made it sound like ‘Oh! Cool, you noticed, thanks!’”

Vincent Martella: “Which is golden. Thank you so much!”

 

How do you all maintain your character voice without breaking or coughing?

Vincent Martella: “I can’t speak for everybody, but I mean, I think everyone’s process is different. But because I’ve been working on the show so long and because I started on the show when I was a teenager and I’ve always been doing a character voice I guess as you guys just heard, it’s not my natural voice. I did a lot of voice lessons and vocal lessons. Like, I studied with an opera coach to figure out different ways to utilize different warmup techniques and how to extend my range in different ways. I did my best to do as much preparation as I could do to make sure that I could not just use this voice for all the conversational things that Phineas has to do, but I sing a lot of music on the show and I have to sing a lot as Phineas. We build things that are very loud and very big, and we are in the sky a lot and I have to be yelling for a lot of these sessions. It’s something that I took a lot of work with and made sure I could do it. But then I also just learned a lot from a lot of these really talented voice actors, and looking at their process and seeing what works for other people. So, it’s- it’s been a lot of different things for me personally, I don’t know about you guys, though.”

Dan Povenmire: “I feel like such a slacker now!”

Swampy Marsh: “Yeah. I watched some old videos of Walter Cronkite.”

Caroline Rhea: “Oh, is that who he is?”

Swampy Marsh: That’s who I stole the voice from, Walter Cronkite. It’s my bad impression of Walter Cronkite. The funny thing is now, too, Vincent was talking again—uh, a couple of the actors, Vince, and Alyson in particular, were really young when we started, so we weren’t using them as other characters. But now, in the new seasons coming up, Vincent appears in tons of episodes of lots of other people, ’cause his natural voice is so different now from his kid voice. Alyson’s the same, she used to just be able to do Isabella. But now, you know, Lady in Store, all these different miscellaneous characters.”

Dan Povenmire: “All these others.”

Swampy Marsh: “We have them doing all these other voices.”

Vincent Martella: “That’s the dream, too. I love getting to come into the booth and they’re like ‘You’re not just playing Phineas today, we actually have, like, five other characters.’”

Swampy Marsh: “’We need you to be a Druelselsteinian traffic cop.’”

Vincent Martella: Yeah, it’s a really fun acting exercise too to have no idea who these characters are about to be and they’re like ‘Now make a different voice. Right now.’”

Dan Povenmire: “A lot of people ask if Doofenshmirtz hurts my voice, which he doesn’t. I can do Doof for two hours straight pretty easily. Um, Monogram, because it’s so low in Swampy’s voice, he can do about 45 minutes before it starts to hurt. And when we did Milo Murphy’s Law, we sort of switched that over where I was the low guy who would talk down here like this, and I could only do that for about 40 minutes before it would hurt. Like, Doofenshmirtz is all head voice, so it doesn’t really hurt my vocal—it sounds like it hurts. It’s very painful, but it’s more painful to listen to, I think.”

Caroline Rhea: “And it’s so much fun to try and imitate.”

David Errigo, Jr.: “Yes. I definitely make sure that I warm up for about two and a half, three hours so that I don’t hurt myself when I come in and work for three minutes.”

Caroline Rhea: “I have this thing this year that all I’m doing is I talk as calmly as possible, because in my mind, I just think that the therapist has told me, ‘Don’t let on that you know your daughter’s crazy. Okay, they’re fine, totally fine, honey.’”

Ashley Tisdale: “Obviously for me, it’s my natural voice. A little bit higher, but I think I realized early on that the energy, like I said, for Candace it takes so much. It is a workout. I think, Season 1 on, I remember doing, like, ‘Okay, I could do three-hours sessions, I could four-hour,’ and then finally I was like ‘Oh, no, I could only do two-hour sessions.’ Like otherwise, I get exhausted and then Candace is just not Candace.

And Dan and Swampy have always been so good to me because I scream so much. We have so many screams in the library. I maybe do one scream each session and Swampy’s like…”

Swampy Marsh: “That’s it.”

Ashley Tisdale: “‘We’ve got years of you screaming, it’s fine.’”

Dan Povenmire: “We have a whole file on the computer that’s just Ashley screaming.”

Swampy Marsh: “Short, medium, long, terrified, excited, every type of scream you can imagine.”

Dan Povenmire: “Yeah, you don’t need to scream for us anymore.”

Ashley Tisdale: “Yes!”

Dan Povenmire: “Save your voice. We have that.”

Ashley Tisdale: “Thank you all so much.”

 

Can you talk about the global success of the show? When did you find out it was a hit?

Swampy Marsh: “We found out when the show launched. I think it’s funny when people call me Jeff, I keep thinking my mom’s here.”

Caroline Rhea: I know! I was like ‘Who’s Jeff?!”

Dan Povenmire: “’Who’s she talking to?’”

Swampy Marsh: B”ut, when we launched the show, we found out we had the first global launch of Disney TV. It premiered all over the world at the same time on the same day. Which was really amazing and wonderful, it really showed Disney’s support for the show, but as a result, it all kind of lit up at once. And I’m shocked at how many places I have traveled around to where it is just as popular as it is here.

And I haven’t experienced anything like that with any of the other stuff that I’ve done, so it is weird to be in an obscure little tiny village somewhere and you find somebody who’s a huge fan of the show.”

Caroline Rhea: “And then I call both of you and have you do voices for me from all different countries.”

Dan Povenmire: “Yes.”

Swampy Marsh: “She does!”

Dan Povenmire: “When we were doing the first season, I was working just ridiculous hours. I would get in at eight in the morning and leave at 11 at night pretty much every day. And I’m ex-wife at the time, I said, ‘You know, I feel like we could make a show that’s funny enough to get a second season, and still leave at, like, seven every day. But that’s not what I’m shooting for, how often do you get a chance to make your own show? What I’m shooting for is changing the demographic of Disney Channel, because I had been on SpongeBob when it changed demographic of Nickelodeon, I’d been on The Simpsons when it changed the demographic of Fox. I felt like that’s the high watermark that you need to shoot for. And within three months of it being on the air, they were already articles about how we had changed the demographic of Disney Channel. And to me, I was shooting for that. I didn’t know if we would hit it. I just thought if I shoot for that, at least we’ll get a second season. And I think the success really far surpassed what we thought we were gonna get.”

Caroline Rhea: “Can I say, Sabrina’s been on the air since 1996 pretty much everywhere in the world every day for, like, a long, long time. And I will go onstage and get introduced from that show and they’re like ‘Okay, yay.’ But I will say that I’m on Phineas & Ferb and I suddenly have the attention of 30-year-old boys.”

 

How does it feel to know you helped shape Disney legacy?

Swampy Marsh: “It’s funny for us. When Dan and I first started doing the development here, there were a lot of people at the channel who really liked the show and said it was funny but had said to us, ‘I don’t think it’s gonna make it on Disney Channel.’ It was very different from what was being produced at the time and the behind-the-scenes opinion was it’s not really a Disney show. It didn’t look like anything else. And it was so wonderful, personally, a year after the show premiered to have people tell us that Phineas & Ferb was being held up as the perfect vision of a Disney show. And that just brought ultimate joy to my heart, ’cause we always thought it was. I always thought it had the virtues that the family viewing, all that stuff, that we grew up with, like people Dan and my age watching The Wonderful World of- of Disney. And so to have that turnaround was really, really gratifying and validated all of the things that we really fought for in the show. So that was just a strange turn.”

 

 

Is there a certain scene or line that was hard for each of you to do when you were recording?

David Errigo, Jr.: Shouting Ferb. Any time that they want him to shout, he’s just such a chill guy and we explore it a lot of times where it’s like ‘Oh, yeah, let’s get one where he’s, like, really projecting here.’ And then almost invariably, Swampy will go… ‘Do it the other way. Just do it the other way.’”

Dan Povenmire: “Ferb doesn’t even really change expressions. Not only does he not talk a lot, but his expression sheet for angry and sad and happy is all the same drawing. We try to keep him pretty neutral.”

Swampy Marsh: “For me, Monogram is singing, it’s really hard to sing as Monogram.”

Vincent Martella: “The only things that end up becoming really vocally taxing are when we have a very loud invention because Phineas, he’s such the idea guy, he’s a lot of times giving direction to the gang and to all the friends. And so, a lot of times I’m yelling—not orders, but instructions at different people over the sound of this really loud invention, and so that can a little vocally tough. The music isn’t hard for me; the music is exciting for me. I feel like I learn something new about what I can do vocally with the music on the show because we do so many genres of music. ’Cause they’ll come to me and they’re like ‘So this week you’re going to be rapping.’ And I’m like, “Am I? That’s something I am not known to do.’ It’s not vocally stressful or something, it’s just more so I’m learning about different things I can do vocally, which is specific to this show how many genres of music we do.”

David Errigo, Jr.: “Alyson, I’ve actually been wondering, how- and I’ve never remembered to ask you. How easy is it for you to get into that Isabella pitch range?”

Alyson Stoner: “Isabella flies high in the sky. And then comes down to the ground. Sometimes I get worried that every new episode, I will have forgotten how to reach the notes. And recently Dan was like ‘You’ve been doing this voice for 20 years. Do you really think that your vocal cords are not stretched enough or the musculatures don’t have this memorized?’ But I do a lot of specific vocal warmups for Isabella that are different from other characters. I will say that, I can’t give away any spoilers, but there has been…”

Vincent Martella: “Do it!”

Alyson Stoner: “…opportunities in this new season to showcase different dimensions of Isabella, which have required me to discover new emotional- different emotions in Isabella’s landscape.”

Swampy Marsh: “Well danced around, Alyson.”

Dan Povenmire: “Yeah, well danced around.”

Swampy Marsh: “Nailed it.”

Vincent Martella: “Alyson is a professional dancer.”

Caroline Rhea: “You can totally run for political office”

Alyson Stoner: Thank you.”

Dan Povenmire: “That was very good.”

Caroline Rhea: “You know what’s really funny? The directions you get as a voice actor, especially from Swampy, ’cause he’s directing like ‘Taller!’ ‘What?’ ‘You’re wearing very heavy shoes.”

Ashley Tisdale: “Yeah, I think for Candace, I think the hardest scenes are just when I start to ramp up into busting them, which is all the time. ‘Oh, here she blows. Here we go!’ And she just starts to get crazy, but I think the best part about animation, especially Candace, it’s really limitless on how crazy I can get. And I think that’s just so fun. Dan and Swampy are so great, I think my favorite thing is to be in the studio and watch them react to how I do it. And then I know I nailed it. I’m like, when I have Swampy and Dan just, like, laughing so hard, I’m like ‘Okay, we’re here, we’ve got it.’”

Swampy Marsh: “You know, it’s funny you say that, some of my favorite stuff with you, you as Candace is when you have conversations with Stacy. ’Cause it is this whole other side, and all of a sudden there’s this great kind of Candace. She’s all over the place, thinking and imagining, so she’s out here. And they’re really great moments, ’cause it is the opposite of what you’re doing when you’re busting. That, to me, is a lot of fun.”

 

Is there a fan favorite moment or line from the original that still cracks you up or gets quoted at you all the time?

Dan Povenmire: “There’s the thing that I hear the most just because it’s become part of pop culture for that generation is, ‘If I had a nickel for every time I blank, I’d have two nickels! Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice, right?’ Which is from the first movie we did. And I have a friend who’s a professor at a college in the Midwest who texted me out of the blue and said, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been hearing people use this bit over and over again in all of my classes for years. And I just finally found out that that’s Doofenschmirtz! I’ve never seen that one!’ And he was like ‘That’s you!” These people are quoting you when they do this!’ People have used it online, the Democratic Party, their official TikTok used that for something recently and I was like ‘Oh, that one has permeated pop culture in a very weird way.’”

Caroline Rhea: ‘I feel like I’ve offered pie to people than more waitresses at Denny’s. ‘Would anyone like pie?’ Which again, in my character’s mind, it’s her therapist saying, ‘Try the pie, it calms the kids down.’”

David Errigo, Jr.: “I love to see the new ways that people engage with the ‘A platypus? Perry the Platypus?’ Just like the myriad of options that we’ve seen.”

Dan Povenmire: “Well, it’s devolved so much that they’ll just have anything that’s teal and orange and then put something brown on it. And it’ll be ‘A platypus? Perry the Platypus!’ “It’s broken down to its very basic form. I love that.”

 

Could you tell us the origin story of the creation and the unique designs of the heads for Phineas and Ferb’s?

Dan Povenmire: “Well, Swampy and I were writing together on a show on another network.” We really liked writing together and wanted to create a show that we could continue to work together. We went through a whole bunch of different designs, at one point we had meerkats, at one point we a toucan and something else. And then I was just at dinner with ex-wife, and they gave you butcher paper and crayons to doodle while you’re waiting for your food.”

Swampy Marsh: “For children.”

Dan Povenmire: “I had a purple crayon, and I just drew this big triangle and said, ‘I wonder if I could make a character whose head was shaped like a triangle,’ ’cause I’d never seen that. And I drew it, and I loved it, and I drew it, like two more times and my- my ex-wife said, ‘Ooh.” Who is that?’ And my actual words I said to her, the first thing that I said about it was ‘This is Phineas. This is the show that we’re gonna sell someday.’”

Caroline Rhea: “What year was that?”

Dan Povenmire: This was 1993. And, I went home, and I drew Perry the Platypus and Ferb and Doofenshmirtz that night and brought ’em into work and we built the whole show around those original drawings.”

Swampy Marsh: “The basis for what we wanted to do was Dan and I, I always say it’s having a middle-aged rant, as middle-aged guys will do, about how kids today didn’t get out and do the stuff we did. We were like ‘They just sit in and watch videos and play video games, and we used to go out and build things and do things and put on plays in our backyard and build go-karts and roll them down hills.’ And a lot of stuff that we don’t advise children to do, because it’s dangerous and crazy. But we wanted to have that spirit back of what we did in the summer, and that was the basis for the whole show.”

Caroline Rhea: “Yeah, remember when you used to get, like, put outside and you were like ‘Come back in when it’s dark’”?

Swampy Marsh: “Yeah. ‘I don’t want to see you till I’m calling in for dinner.’”

Dan Povenmire: “That’s- that’s how we were raised.”

Swampy Marsh: It’s called benevolent neglect. We had access to tools as well, it was great.”

 

What are some of your favorite family moments from the show?

Dan Povenmire: “Well, I think Swampy, and I both really love the episode ‘Dude, We’re Getting the Band Back Together,’ it was the first time we had Candace and Phineas and Ferb working together for the same goal. And there’s a moment at the end of that where Candace just puts her arm around Phineas in this, like, really sisterly love way and I love it whenever we get to see how much they really care about each other. And we do it not as often in the 11-minute episodes, ’cause we pit them against each other in a sort of fun way. But whenever we get to see that, that always just, it’s like at the end of ‘Summer Belongs to You,’ when we wrote this song, “Summer Belongs to You,” at the end it’s summing it up the whole feel of the series. And we’d written one verse and a chorus, and then on the way into work the next day I was like ‘Wait a minute. We need to give Candace a verse where she talks about how proud she is of her brothers!’ And then how…they helped her.”

Caroline Rhea: “Are you crying?”

Swampy Marsh: “Yes, he is.”

Dan Povenmire: “It makes cry when I watch that. It’s so good.”

Vincent Martella: “I think that’s the best song, in my personal opinion. I think it’s the best song we’ve ever done on the show. For exactly what you’re talking about, I mean, it’s obviously a really catchy pop song, but yeah.”

Swampy Marsh: “Yeah. I still remember there was this really sweet moment that came- it was an ad-lib from Richard O’Brien, who plays Dad. And it was the monster truck episode and Dad calls Mom to say, ‘Hello, dear, the boys are building a monster truck in the back yard,’ and Mom doesn’t understand. But Richard just ad-libbed—he said, ‘Hello, darling. Oh, I- I love you too, dear. Anyway,’ and he just threw it out there, but it was this wonderful moment where it suddenly made that family real and that relationship really alive.

When we get those little moments in the midst of all this insanity, these wonderful real connection moments like, the hug with Candace, I love watching those, and every time I see them, I smile.”

Alyson Stoner: “I can add in the most diplomatic of ways that perhaps in the first episode of the new season, there will be quite a powerful moment for the family in ways you can’t even fathom.”

Phineas & Ferb premieres June 5 on Disney Channel and June 6 on Disney+!

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.