Perspectives on a Popular Disney Cartoon

Over the past few years, Barbara has gotten into watching a relatively new cartoon on Disney called Phineas and Ferb, and recently I have taken note of some things about the cartoon itself.  I am by no means a connoisseur of contemporary culture - most of it is just too bizarre these days for me.  So, for me to take an interest in a cartoon like this is going to probably come as a surprise to many who know me.  For that, you can thank my wife.

When Barbara started watching this Phineas and Ferb cartoon some time back, I would occasionally sit and watch some of it with her. While it is a somewhat amusing and clean cartoon, I never took much of an interest in it.  However, in the past couple of weeks, I learned a few things about it that fascinated me, and that inspired me to write this.

As I understand after doing a little research, this cartoon first aired I believe about ten years ago, and the last episode of it ended the series in 2015.  I had gradually began to lose interest in cartoons over the past several years as they have gradually disappeared from the traditional Saturday morning lineups that many of us grew up with - Saturdays, sadly, have not been the same since.  I, as an aging Gen-Xer, grew up in an era that produced cartoons such as Scooby Doo, The Flintstones, The Smurfs, as well as classic Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barbera creations from ages past.  When I was around 7 or 8 years old, it was something to look forward to in waking up on Saturday morning after a busy school week and watching cartoons while eating a bowl of dry peanut butter Captain Crunch cereal or a couple of blueberry Pop-tarts for breakfast, and those were fun times.  However, as I grew up, went off to college, and started to get into a life routine, Saturday morning cartoons went from a nice wake-up diversion from a busy workweek to being practically non-existent as in recent years kids really don't watch cartoons as much, and what they do watch is honestly far short of the fun and creativity of the cartoons many of us grew up with.  Many kids unfortunately are so engrossed in social media and gadgets that cartoons are not even part of their lives anymore, and it seems like an era of creativity is dying with the younger generations as a result.  But, on occasion, there are those bright exceptions, and little did I know it but my wife happened to stumble upon one of those when she tuned into a program one day called Phineas and Ferb, and it was reminiscent of those older cartoons of ages past.  That being said, let me now get to a couple of interesting things I wanted to point out about this interesting little cartoon.

The first is its creators, Dan Povenmire and Jeff "Swampy" Marsh - I want to particularly talk about Marsh.  Anyone who knows me by now doesn't need to be made aware that one of my great passions is the music of the great dance bands of the 1920's-1940's.   One very good band was led by a young Pennsylvania-born saxophonist by the name of Les Brown (1912-2001) (not to be confused with the popular African-American motivational speaker - they are different people, as the Les Brown I am talking about is a White guy).  Les Brown, starting around 1936 or so, led two bands - the first was a college orchestra out of Duke University called the Duke Blue Devils, which he led for the better half of the latter 1930's, and the other was his more famous orchestra of the mid-1940's and early 1950's which was called Les Brown's Band of Renown.   This was a band that in its height of popularity featured a young girl singer by the name of Doris Day, who cut a record with the band called Sentimental Journey in 1945 that became a classic hit and one of the biggest records of the era.  Brown also had a stellar theme song too which he recorded around the same time entitled Leap Frog (which was composed by Joe Garland, who also wrote Glenn Miller's classic hit In the Mood several years earlier).   So, what is the connection between one of the greatest big bandleaders of the 1940's and a Disney cartoon that is popular today?  The answer is Jeff Marsh, who happens to be Les Brown's grandson.   Marsh is the brains behind Phineas and Ferb, and I just found that out the other day when I was messing around on my Facebook page and just happened to come across Les Brown Jr's recent posts (Les Jr., now in his 70's, is carrying on his father's legacy by continuing the orchestra, which still tours and performs today).  I happened to see a picture on Les Jr's page that had his family posing with two Phineas and Ferb characters, and when I saw that, I was intrigued and wondered what on earth that was about.  That was when, after digging a little further, I found out that Les Jr. is Marsh's uncle, and thus making the late Les Sr. his grandfather.  All-in-all, it was a neat piece of trivia.

A second thing that got me interested more in what Phineas and Ferb is about has to do with something that sort of made me think of my own childhood.  For those of you who may have casually tuned into snippets of the cartoon with your kids or grandkids, the plot of the whole thing is these two step-brothers who basically are on summer vacation and they, along with a pet platypus (the co-creator of the cartoon, Povenmire, said they chose this because there had never been a platypus before on TV - that is not exactly correct, because a Warner Brothers cartoon in the early 1990's, Taz-Mania, featured a pair of twin platypus brothers called just that, the Platypus Brothers!) who also moonlights as a secret agent who sort of monitors the activities of a bumbling mad scientist who serves as the main antagonist in the cartoon.   As part of their summer vacation, the two boys keep themselves busy coming up with these grandiose inventions that kids my age used to dream about doing - it is like vicariously living out childhood fantasies, and many of us relate well to that.  In explaining the who creativity angle of the cartoon, Povenmire notes "When I was growing up, my mom always encouraged us to something creative with our time rather than sit around being bored.  She used to say, 'Summer's short.  You've got to make every day count."  And that's exactly what Phineas and Ferb do." (Michael Levin, "What Makes Phineas and Ferb the  Most Original TV Show Since Ernie Kovacs? at www.huffingtonpost.com/michaellevin/what-makes-phineas-ferb_b_5398580.html - accessed 5/29/2017).   Marsh adds another important aspect to this as well, as he says that "We both commiserated about how we used to go off and do crazy stuff in the summer, while kids today were just sitting around playing Xbox and watching videos."  Marsh struck a nerve with me in his comment, as he is spot-on - what has happened in the past 20 years or so to most kids??  They don't do nothing but sit on their butts on phones and other gadgets, and there is no real creativity going on with many of them.  When I was their age, I had a pretty full agenda in the summer months, as I was either out tramping around in the woods, building forts with friends, fishing and catching other critters in the creeks and ponds around the area, picking berries or digging wild garlic, and when I was indoors, I was reading a lot of books and magazines or working on a large record collection, as well as teaching myself how to cook.   Creativity was all I had then, especially when money was in short supply and I was growing up poor in a single-parent home in a tiny obscure town in the hills of West Virginia.  These kids have access to so much more today, but they don't do anything with it except sit around on their butts pushing buttons - that is one reason why there are more fat kids in today's schools than there was in my day.  I was so busy during the summers in my childhood that I never had time to gain any weight, and I didn't get the spare tire I have now until my middle-age years.  Like Povenmire says in another article, many of us understood the power of imagination, and doing fun activities is a way to tap into raw creativity.  Today, there is not much the kids on Ipods and cellphones can tap into - the most effort they do is push buttons, and that doesn't even encourage good grammar!  One of the reasons that Phineas and Ferb achieved the popularity it has in the past five or six years is that there is a void within many young people that they don't even realize, and the innate desire for creativity is aroused by seeing cartoon characters come up with crazy yet innovative ideas and then make them materialize.  Povenmire and Marsh know what they are doing, in other words, and it is brilliant!

The cartoon has a surprising appeal to adults my age and even older, in that for us it is re-acquainting many of us with our childhood memories.  When I watch Phineas and Ferb create a whole beach scene in their backyard or a huge space elevator contraption, I am reminded myself of the time I tried to create my own island in the middle of Grassy Lick Run in downtown Kirby, WV, based on things I read in some book.  Or, I recall the way I turned the drainage ditch that separated our front yard from the Westfall's cornfield into an outdoor lounge area just for the hell of it.  I am sure others who watch this cartoon have similar flashbacks to their youth and things they did.  The childhood imagination is a great thing, and what I regret about it was not picking up the art of journaling sooner, as it would have been great to go back and read some of the stuff I wrote down and came up with back then.

There are some people who watch Phineas and Ferb and are impressed with the musical score it has, but not me.  The music is actually one of the weaker parts of the program, and given Marsh's legacy as being the grandson of a true musical legend, it comes up sort of disappointing for some of us.  But, even there, it is not without its genius.  I briefly caught an episode of the cartoon once where the boys decided to create a one-hit wonder as a summer project, and I chuckled at the genius of the creators of the cartoon as they were taking a well-aimed potshot at pop culture on that one.   The boys came up with some stupid song that consisted of a bunch of meaningless syllables, and it ended up being a hit, and then they decided to "retire" from the music business at the height of the popularity of that song.  The whole plot made fun, whether accidentally or intentionally, of many no-talent hacks out there (that idiot Justin Bieber comes to mind!) who have all the musical talent of a cat with its tail caught in a meatgrinder, yet for some reason their tone-deaf audiences are gobbling it all up like there's no tomorrow; that is, until the next hack comes along and gets the young girls all a-twitter and screaming like crazy.  A lot of today's music also displays the same lack of creativity the creators of Phineas and Ferb purposefully wrote into that episode (again, this is brilliant on their part) and there is no thought put into lyrics, no real musical chemistry, and essentially much of today's pop music is about selling image rather than actual talent.  It really is not just about a bunch of monsyllabic lyrics either, as better music from ages past also incorporated to a degree some vocal improvisation, but there was always a purpose behind it.  One example is the iconic "Vo-do-do-dee-oh-do!" of a lot of the music of the 1920's - the seemingly nonsensical lyric was actually a rhythmic accompaniment to a dance step.  Another example is the late bandleader Kay Kyser's hit 1939 recording of a children's ditty called Three Little Fishies, which was written by Hal Kemp's reedman/arranger Saxie Dowell in the mid-1930's - part of the lyrics of this song consist of a phrase that goes "Poop, poop, diddem, daddem, waddem choo!"  which actually mimics what humans think fish sound like.  Then, there is the 1942 hit by the Merry Macs called Mairzy Doats, which has this lyric: "Mairzy doats and dozie doats, and liddle lamzy divey, a kiddley divey doo wooden shoe..."  That particular tune was based on a nursery rhyme phrase that a little kid might misinterpret, and it actually says "Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivey, a kid'll eat ivey too, wouldn't you?"  In this case, it was just a cute nursery rhyme that was sung in a way that a toddler might understand it, so it was within a good context.  Then, of course, there is David Seville's (he was creator of the Chipmunks - his real name was Ross Bagdasarian Jr., and he was a cousin to author William Saroyan) classic Witch Doctor from the year 1958, which imitates a fictional tribal language of a goofy witch doctor in the way a Westerner might misinterpret the language as a bunch of goofy syllables.  It is possible that Marsh, who probably grew up with knowing a lot of these songs, used the ideas to also lampoon modern pop culture with its lack of creativity by having Phineas and Ferb come up with a goofy "one-hit wonder" that got the girls atwitter yet only lasted until the next fad came along.  I kind of see it as a slap against tone-deaf "experts" such as that jackass Simon Cowell as well, who think they know music but really don't.  I cannot say whether or not the creators of the cartoon meant that to be their idea, but I can personally see it as a good parody of celebrity culture that lacks real talent.  The true talent is in the parody itself, and it showcases the gifts of both Povenmire and Marsh well.  A final example of where music can be expressed creatively in monosyllabic lyrics is the twin arts of "scat" and vocalese.  Scat-singing and vocalese are part of the repertoire of classic jazz, as well as the more sophisticated pop songs of the 1950's which often featured choruses who sang a lot of "doo-dah's" and "ooooh's" as part of instrumental recordings - classic examples of these from big bands include Tommy Dorsey's classic 1953 recording of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, his brother Jimmy's 1957 recording of So Rare, Ray Conniff's 1956 hit recording of S'wonderful, and Lawrence Welk's 1961 gold record of Calcutta.  In records like those, the vocal sounds become in essence an extension of the orchestra, so they accent the instrumentation of the orchestra itself and make a great chemistry.  As for "scat" itself, it sort of does the same thing for a soloist, and good scat-singing is phenomenal in that it is raw improvisation at its best - the late legend Louis Armstrong was the master of that art. The dumb lyrics of many of today's "pop stars" lack that imagination and instead highlight the lack of talent and laziness of the "artist" themselves - essentially, the music business has changed to one of what one sees rather than what one hears, and as long as the "singer" is considered "eye-candy" by the public, it doesn't seem to matter what they sound like.  It has even gotten so deceptive that now artificial enhancements manipulate recorded soundtracks to make them supposedly sound "better," all because it is the image rather than talent being marketed.  A few generations back, Justin Bieber and Katy Perry would not have stood a chance - Bieber is no Sinatra, and Perry is no Doris Day.  Marsh knows what real talent is about I believe, because his own grandfather discovered and nurtured it over 70 years ago when Justin Bieber's daddy was not even an afterthought yet.  And, that is the message I think Marsh and Povenmire wanted to convey to their viewing audience when they created the "musical episode" of the cartoon series. Again, it is genius.

In wrapping this all up, an appeal to my own childhood imagination from many years back as well as an unexpected connection to one of my own interests is what compelled me to take a cartoon like Phineas and Ferb, which I normally would not even take an interest in, more seriously.  Also, the fact that it is a clean cartoon that hones in on the innocence and creativity of childhood imagination rather than trying to push agendas like so much else of today's entertainment (the LGBT lobby in particular, which now has to stick "token gay" characters into plots where they otherwise would not have any relevance - even the iconic Star Trek legacy was infected by that in the last motion picture) rather than just simply being entertaining, is a factor in why I believe it is a good program to watch.  It is surprisingly appealing to adults too, as it makes us look back to some of our own childhood adventures, and sometimes it is good to just do that.  Therefore, if you want a good, clean, wholesome, and just entertaining cartoon for your kids or grandkids to watch, this is a fine example of a cartoon which has returned to the original purpose of what cartoons were aired for - creativity and entertainment.  Not since the Veggietales has such a good children's program been available to a wide audience, and therefore Disney is to be commended for getting something right for a change, while Povenmire and Marsh should be encouraged to keep up the good work.  Anyway, that is my rant for the week, so I will leave it there.