
At some point, Cavendish and Dakota cross paths with Milo, and now their two storylines are weirdly but genially intertwined. Zone (Jemaine Clement)-whose fictional adventures, it turns out, were inspired by the real-life time-traveler duo Cavendish (Jeff “Swampy” Marsh) and Dakota (Dan Povenmire), whose sole task in the series’ Doofenshmirtz-esque B-story is not to do petty evil, but to do the petty heroics needed to prevent pistachios from going extinct.
#Milo murphy series#
Instead of a sister trying to bust him, Sara (Kate Micucci) joins Milo in an obsession with a sci-fi series featuring a time-traveling hero named Dr. (Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”) Instead of a pet that daylights as a secret agent, Milo’s dog, Diogee (D-O-G), is just a dog-if a cosmically good one who often saves Milo by sheer dumb doggo-ness. Where Phineas and Ferb were blessed with improbable luck, Marsh and Povenmire’s new creation, Milo Murphy, is afflicted with a familial predisposition to trigger the least probable disaster to happen in any given moment. In their follow-up to Phineas and Ferb, producing partners Jeff “Swampy” Marsh and Dan Povenmire stayed in their fictional burg of Danville, but went searching for comedic conflict in the opposite direction.

(They may even, at one point, have chased the actual Sun.) And yet, all the way up through the series’ final bow in 2015, the Build it-Bust it-Secret-Agent-it formula never went stale Phineas and Ferb grew up and into their mad scientist powers, and kept the sweet optimism of invention and childhood not just alive but dynamic throughout. That is a lot of building/inventing/adventuring for two brothers and their gaggle of neighborhood friends on one side of town, and for Perry the Platypus and Dr. Most of the series’ 126 half-hour episodes contain two distinct 11-minute stories, on top of which the brothers make time for a handful of one-hour specials and a Disney Channel original movie. At its most basic (though it was never basic), Phineas and Ferb is a story about a pair of mad scientist step-brothers who set out each morning of their summer vacation to build/invent/adventure into something awesome to make that day the best day ever, while their older sister tries (and fails) to bust them, and their pet platypus daylights as a secret agent whose B-story nemesis spends each day building/inventing/adventuring into something dangerously petty to make his life suck just a bit less. The great ones, though, aware of the Sun’s movement in the sky, are in constant chase, using those formulas to identify their own strongest elements and nimbly iterate in new and creative ways as the seasons progress.ĭisney’s Phineas and Ferb, as Paste’s own Josh Jackson noted way back in 2009, was one of the great ones from the very start. The lazier shows, seeing their formula as a kind of Sun, bright and immutable, will let themselves be entranced by the shine, standing still so long they eventually bake themselves into staleness. Television-especially comedic television especially comedic animated television-works off of formulas.

Phineas: We… have no frame of reference for that. Melissa: What do you normally do when things go wrong?
