dry land. Or riveting bolts into a hand-built roller coaster—which also functions as a space rocket. Usually the grown-up will turn to the triangle-headed Phineas Flynn and his oblong-domed stepbrother, Ferb Fletcher, and wonder, “Aren’t you boys a little young to be discovering Atlantis?” or “Aren’t you kids a little young to go into outer space?” To which Phineas, a red-haired kid with big eyes and even bigger ideas, answers with an earnest “Yes. Yes, we are.”

But attempting the impossible—and pulling it off almost entirely on their own—is what plucky Phineas and his dutiful sidekick, Ferb, are all about as they optimize every summer-vacation day (104 of them, to be exact). And in just about every episode, an over-the-top idea comes to life, transforming their suburban backyard into a reasonable facsimile of an intergalactic Maker Faire. (Make a ski slope with the help of a Sno-Cone machine? Sure! Build an elevator to the moon? Why not!)

Phineas has a habit of announcing brightly, “I know what we’re going to do today!” For Bart Simpson, that would mean a prank phone call to Moe’s Tavern; for the South Park slackers, a stream of V-Chipped obscenities (at the least). “The easiest place to go for humor is characters saying mean things to each other,” says one of the show’s creators, Dan Povenmire. “But we wanted them to be genuinely nice with each other and still have some edge.”

As odd as it sounds, “edgy” these days seems to mean creating characters for kids that are unabashedly smart. Phineas and Ferb put their energy into building things—a lot of highly imaginative and complicated projects, actually—like their own backyard beach or a teleportation device that sends people to Mars. Phineas and Ferb’s world is wild and inventive, more like a Boing Boing post than a Saturday morning cartoon. In other words, they’re geeks. They just don’t know the word for it yet.

Disney, the studio behind the series, has found a word to describe it: successful. Now in its second season, Phineas and Ferb is currently the number one animated series in two key (and overlapping) TV demographics: kids ages 6 to 11 and tweens ages 9 to 14. It’s also enjoying critical praise and industry accolades, with a daytime Emmy win for Outstanding Writing in Animation and a cavalcade of celebrity cameos, including the voices of Ben Stiller and Tina Fey. The show’s soundtracks—cheeky riffs on pop hits—have landed on the Billboard charts. And from Phineas T-shirts to plush Ferbs, there are nearly 150 merchandising deals in the works worldwide; the cartoon brand is now estimated to be a multimillion-dollar property. Phineas and Ferb are quickly becoming as big as SpongeBob and the most recognizable TV siblings since Bart and Lisa.

Like on The Simpsons, the jokes fly fast; they’re just sillier sometimes (“Stickiness is the most underrated of all the nesses”) and more overtly cerebral other times, with jokes about cartilaginous fibers, quantum theory, and Moby-Dick. Of course, like all great cartoons since Bugs Bunny, Phineas and Ferb has to work on a few levels to be accessible to kids while slyly appealing to their parents. But it is, without question or apology, a kids’ show. No acid-tongued celebrity parodies. No thinly veiled political commentary. No wink-wink stoner references. At the same time, the show avoids didactic “One to Grow On” moments about being nice to your friends and true to yourself. The central message of the show is woven into its concept: Be smart. Be creative. Have fun. Life is an endless summer—never waste a single day of it.

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the creators of the show live by that philosophy. Povenmire, 47, and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh, 49, have put in their time as creative soldiers in Hollywood’s animated trenches. Between them, they’ve done animating, directing, and writing for The Simpsons, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Family Guy. But now that they’re finally running a show of their own, the partners have pulled off what many thought impossible: a geeky hit cartoon series for adolescent boys with nary an ounce of snark or whiff of a fart joke.

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Authors: Gavin Edwards

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