Phineas and Ferb Are Back! The Cast Reflects On 18-Year Evolution, Voice Acting, and Legacy
It’s been 18 years since Phineas and Ferb introduced us to the magical summer adventures of two inventive stepbrothers and their secret agent pet platypus. Now the animated series returns to Disney Channel for a fifth season, bringing our favorite voice actors back together again. Pop Culture Planet participated in a virtual press conference for the series where the cast and creatives discussed the evolution of these characters, voice acting, and the show’s legacy.
“Phineas has been a huge, huge part of my life and what’s been wonderful about this show is that it has such an incredible audience. We’ve always had reasons to play these characters again,” said Vincent Martella, who has continued to voice Phineas in Candace Against The Universe, Milo Murphy’s Law, and even the Chibiverse. “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 an emotional experience. I was really, really moved and excited because 18 years is a really long time to do anything or to know someone. I’ve known all these wonderful people I get to work with and I’ve known this character for so long. It’s been really, really fun getting to be back doing this job every week. I hope we get to forever.”
Much has changed since they first started recording the show, including both Caroline Rhea and Ashley Tisdale becoming mothers. “You know what’s really fun? When we started this, I think it was 2008 that we went on the air. My daughter had not been born yet and now my daughter is 16,” said Rhea. “So it’s very fun playing Mom, talking to someone. Now Candace is a whole different person to me.”
Playing Candace can be a workout for Tisdale, but luckily the team has collected a huge library of screams over the years so she can save her 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. 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!’” laughed Tisdale. “I could only imagine her in my womb being like, ‘What is happening out there?’”
It may be surprising to learn, but Martella’s real voice is very different from that of his character Phineas. Because of that he did a lot of preparation to make sure he could talk, yell, and sing in a way that he could sustain. “I did a lot of voice lessons and vocal lessons. 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,” he revealed. “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 so 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. I intentionally took a lot of work with it and made sure I could do it.”
That hard work paid off because now, for the first time in the series, both Martella and Alyson Stoner are able to step up to take on other voices in the show. “Vince and Alyson were really young when we started, so we weren’t using them as other characters,” said co-creator Jeff “Swampy” Marsh. “But now, in the new seasons coming up, like Vincent appears in tons of episodes as 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. We have them doing all these other voices.”
“That’s the dream,” chimed in Martella. “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.’ […] 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.’”
Co-creator Dan Povenmire shared that people often ask him if it hurts his voice to play Dr. Doofenshmirtz. “I can do Doof for two hours straight pretty easily. Monogram, because it’s so low in Swampy’s voice, he can do about 45 minutes before it starts to hurt,” he said. “When we did Milo Murphy’s Law, we switched that over where I was the low guy who would talk down here […] and I could only do that for about 40 minutes before it would hurt. Doofenshmirtz is all head voice, so it doesn’t really hurt my vocals. It sounds like it hurts […] but it’s more painful to listen to, I think.”
Meanwhile Dee Bradley Baker, who voices Perry the Platypus, joked about his process getting into character: “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 to life.”
As Phineas and Ferb returns nearly 10 years to the date of the season 4 finale, it only makes sense to look back at the show’s cultural impact. “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 the first movie we did,” said Povenmire. “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!’ He was like, ‘That’s you! These people are quoting you when they do this!’ People have used it online. Like the Democratic Party, their official TikTok used that for something recently. That one has permeated pop culture in a very weird way.”
“[Then] in 2020, 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,” continued Povenmire. “It’s the strangest thing that’s ever happened in my life.”
The creators and voice actors of Phineas and Ferb have helped shape the Disney legacy over the course of their careers. Now with the show back for a brand new generation, it’s clear that impact was always the goal. “When we were doing the first season, I was working just ridiculous hours [and] I told my ex-wife at the time, I said, ‘I feel like we could make a show that’s funny enough to get a second season and still leave at 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,’” said Povenmire, who had worked on SpongeBob Squarepants and The Simpsons when they changed the demographic of Nickelodeon and Fox, respectively. “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. The success really far surpassed what we thought we were going to get.”
“When Dan and I first started doing the development here, there was 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 going to 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,” said Marsh. “And it was so wonderful, personally, to — a year after the show premiered — have people tell us that Phineas and Ferb was being held up as the perfect vision of a Disney show. That just brought ultimate joy to my heart ’cause we always thought it was. […] To have that turnaround was really, really gratifying and validated all of the things that we really fought for in the show.”
The adventure continues in Phineas and Ferb’s brand new fifth season, which premieres June 5 on Disney Channel and hits Disney+ the next day.
