Phineas & Ferb Creator Swampy Marsh Interview
Jeff “Swampy” Marsh, along with his friend and colleague Dan Povenmire, created Phineas and Ferb back in 1993. A mere 15 years later it was picked up by the Disney Channel and has fast become one of their most popular shows, picked up bucket loads of awards, and been seen by an estimated 289 million people worldwide.
To help explain the process behind their success, and to explore the trials and tribulations associated with the life of an animator, Swampy and Dan put together this video:
We’re often told that a great show can be summarised in a single sentence, but Phineas and Ferb has three main plot lines. How would you summarise Phineas and Ferb in one sentence, and was the complexity of the premise an issue during the pitching process?
Oh yeah, absolutely! Well, Phineas and Ferb is the story of two stepbrothers who spend their summer trying to make every day the best ever, and their sister Candace is always trying to get them busted – not because she dislikes them, but because she believes that if she were to do the same things they did, that she would get in trouble – so it’s only fair that they should get in trouble for what they do… and their pet platypus is a secret agent who goes every day to fight the evil Dr Doofenshmirtz, who is bent on taking over the tri-state area.
Fairly straight forward!
Well it’s a long sentence, but well done!
A very long sentence! But yeah, that complication I think frightened a lot of people, and definitely played into the decision for folks not to pick up the show on more than one or two occasions. We did get comments of ‘well can we just strip these other stories out of this and just do this one, and it was either people not believing that we had the capability of doing it, or not believing that kids would get complex storylines, interwoven storylines. But we thought kids would definitely get it – they’re a lot smarter than people think, a lot more savvy, even back in 1993 when we first created the show – and as far as doubting our ability to do it, that was probably sensible!
It famously took 15 years between concept and pickup. Can you tell us a bit about that process, why you think it was so hard, and whether you think it’s a better show for having had that time?
Well, it was 13 years of pitching it before we could get anybody to make a pilot, and then 2 years before it went on the air, so that’s 15 in total. We pitched it everywhere, absolutely everywhere you could possibly pitch it and a few extra places beyond that. It always got a good response, everybody like it. We always believed it was the show that we should be making and it was the show we wanted to work on, so we just kept pitching it.
The thing that makes me happiest after going through all of this process, is that all of the things that we fought to keep are the reasons that we hear from the fans, both kids and adults, that they love the show so much. And it’s nice, after spending all that time pitching around and not changing the show, to have it validated in that way. It makes all that time that we spent pitching it and looking like morons, worthwhile.
If we’d have sold it when we first created it, I really don’t think it would’ve had anything like the success. We changed, we grew, we became more mature people, and the content I think would’ve been very different. We got to the place where we wanted to make a show that wasn’t filled with jerks and idiots, and really kept the humour level up – really smart, intelligent, witty stuff. And I think when we first created it in ’93, we were both personally a little more immature and didn’t have the kids in our lives that made us think “we should create something that we’d be proud to have our kids watch” so that content changed. We’d also both gone on and had really great careers, so I think that gave us the courage to fight some of the battles that we fought. We had gotten to the point where we thought ‘we really don’t care, say no if you like – we’ve been pitching it 13 years, and we’ll keep pitching it, so if you don’t like what we’ve done – nah!’
And do you think the world was ready for it in 93?
I don’t know – I’d like to think so, because all the things that we thought were really cool about it back then, I think would’ve found an audience absolutely, but I don’t think it would’ve had the same global reaction that it did.
And what was it about the show that made you know not to change it, made you keep the confidence all those years to just keep going with it?
Every time we took it out, pitched it, talked about it and thought about it, we really just looked at it and thought “this is a great show.” Every time we thought maybe we should pull it out and make it less complicated, we thought we should maybe take some of the notes on board, we’d look at it and think ‘No. This works.’ You know we’ve thought about it, we’ve talked about it, we’ve debated it and at the end of every conversation we’d just go “no, it’s staying exactly the way it is. This is how it should be.”
Phineas and Ferb works fantastically well worldwide. What is it about the show that you think travels so well?
From a parental point of view, I think everybody wants their kids to watch something that is inspirational, that’s positive. Again, doesn’t have a lot of jerks and idiots, and from the kids point of view – we’ve gotten so much feedback from kids saying that they appreciate the fact that someone is doing smart programming for them, that someone is treating them like intelligent folks. That to me, that’s the biggest thing.
So, can you tell us a bit about your early career. Looking at it retrospectively, it looks as though you made the leap from background artist to writer/director very quickly – I don’t know if that’s how it felt at the time –
Yeah, it was a very quick leap
It sounds pretty impressive and will make a lot of our readers kinda hate you, but can you tell us what it was about you that you think enabled you to make that leap so early, and how you got to that point?
Well, I’d spent the first working years of my life, up to the age of 28, doing almost everything else that you could possibly do. My list of jobs is comically long. I’d ended up in the computer business, very unhappy, and at 28 I just quit. I had no idea what I was going to do, and a buddy of mine helped me put a portfolio together, and I think about 3 months later I had a job on the Simpsons, which was – I couldn’t have landed in a better spot.
I was just so overjoyed that they would pay me to do this that for the next 2 years that I was on the show, in all of my lunches, before and after work, trying to find out how to do all the other jobs on the show. Literally, I sat and watched them run camera for a couple of weeks straight – just said
“Do you mind if I sit in here while I eat my lunch and just watch what you’re doing, will you tell me what you’re doing? – teach me how to time, all this stuff.”
And on one of our hiatus’, we’d taken some freelance work with a few of the other guys on the crew, doing a show called ‘Little Dracula’. I remember the guy came in, it was a small company and we were just trying to fill a gap, and he said
“Hi, we need storyboard artists, do you guys know any storyboard artists?”
And I said
“Yes absolutely, we’re storyboard artists.”
Everybody in the room kinda looked at me and said
“What are you talking about?!”
We were all doing designs, but the guy said
“Great, are you guys available next week?”
I went
“Yeah absolutely”
And he said
“Ok great, what’s your rate?”
I didn’t know – I thought ‘how much do storyboard artists make? What am I making now?’ So I just made up a figure that was like – I gave myself a 30% pay rise and just said,
“yeah that’s our rate.”
And he said
“Terrific, let me go get it cleared.”
He walked out of the room, and the other people went
“Are you nuts!?”
And I said,
“Well, if you’ve ever wanted to storyboard, now’s your chance! The worst that can happen is that we’ll fail, and we’ll go back to the Simpsons, but at least if you want the chance to do this, now’s the time. And I called a friend of mine, a really great storyboard artists called Kevin, and said
“Kevin, can you teach me how to storyboard?”
He said
“Yeah, absolutely”
I said
“Great, now, can you teach me how to storyboard by Monday?”
And he laughed and he said
“I’ll tell you what, come over this weekend and I’ll teach you enough that you won’t get fired on Monday and we’ll kinda take it day by day.”
And over the course of that job, I learnt how to storyboard at least well enough not to be fired. And by that time I’d kinda learned enough stuff that when the offer to go write and direct on Rocko’s Modern Life came up, I had enough confidence to say
“Yeah I can do that.”
And we got along, they thought I was a funny guy, and it was when I was first put together with Steve Hillenburg, who went on to do Spongebob. After Steve and I did a few boards together they decided Dan and I would make a good team, and that’s when I first got put together with Dan.
So yeah, it was only 4 years but I did a lot of work, and I kinda made up for not ever going to school for animation in that time.
Dan Povenmire (L) and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh (R)
Your relationship with (co-creator) Dan Povenmire seems to be at the heart of the show. What’s that relationship like, and is there anything in the show where you can say “that’s mine – that’s his” or is it very much collaborative?
One of the reasons we like working together so much, is that we’re like, you know, ‘brothers from another mother.’
Our sense of humour is the same. We’re good at telling whose jokes are whose, but most people aren’t and we find that our comedy voice is pretty similar. The nice thing about that too is that if I’m not there and Dan needs to make notes I can pretty much rest assured that he’s going to make same the notes that I’d make, and he feels the same.
We sit in notes sessions sometimes for animatics, and it’s really comical – I’ll see him out of the corner of my eye and will watch him make notes, and it’s almost simultaneous. And sometimes Dan will just write a note that says ‘at 3.30, Swampy’s got the note.’ And he’ll have it written, and he’ll wait until I read and and then he’ll go
“Yeah, that’s what I had” – we do it all the time.
It makes it hard for some of the artists who want to try that I’ll go and ask Mum, and if she says no I’ll go and ask Dad – people all the time say “yeah, that’s what Dad said”. It’s always exactly the same.
So are you Mum or Dad?
I don’t know! I think it depends on who has the stronger feelings about any particular issue. People will try to avoid the person they think will give them the harshest answer, but at the end of the day they always get the same answer from both of us.
It’s just nice. It makes working creatively very comfortable, because I just don’t have to worry about what’s going on with that whole side of it. We could be in two places at once and pretty much have the same artist temperament and the same ideas and the same creative input.
It makes working with anyone else now a really scary prospect.
So if you did another show it would be with Dan again?
Yeah.
After creating the show, and coming up with the concept with Dan, you then spent 6 years in England – which means we’re taking credit for all your later work and achievements
As you should!
Can you tell us how that period affected your life and your work, and what you took from it?
I was supposed to come over here for 2 years, to do a show for the BBC – an adult sketch comedy show called ‘Aargh! It’s the Mr Hell Show’ with Bob Monkhouse. It was on briefly, but the programmer at the BBC who took over from the guy who commissioned the show openly didn’t like it, so sort of buried it at odd times on Sunday evening til the show went away. It was very sad, but I just kept getting more offers to stay here – and I’d kinda gotten out of sync with our season rotation back in the States.
When the Mr Hell show wrapped, it was mid-season for us, so there were no jobs currently available, which was fine because literally I got 3 offers to stay here and I ended up staying on and when that one came to an end I got more offers, and I was having a good time socially. By that time my son was born, he was born down in Guildford, and it ended up being 6 and a half years and I got to work with some truly amazing people.
There’s a different work ethic here. There’s this really great focus on what you’re doing right now. In LA, everybody’s an actor, everybody’s a screenwriter, and every animator has 3 projects they’re working on. And that’s fine, I really support that with folks, but there was just a really nice feeling where everybody in the room was really focused on just what they were doing right now, that day, that project, and trying to do their best work. And it was kind of a relief. It was a really wonderfully pleasant way to work. And I loved all of the people I worked with here, and just socially, all the input from UK television and UK comedians and all that had a massive impact.
That’s another reason I think the show wouldn’t have been as successful had we sold it at the time when we originally created it, ‘cos a lot of that – you know Ferb being British, and a lot of the people that we’ve brought in to do voices and the style of jokes that we do has been influenced by being in England. And also, a huge awareness of the wider world that I, like many Americans, was ignorant of for quite some time, and so that desire to keep the show internationally friendly was kinda born there, and I think that’s really paid off for us.
And you have a lot of British guest stars – there’s more Brits there than any nationality other than American – do you feel that they give a different performance, or why have you chosen to go that way?
There were so many people that I got to know while I was over here that I was desperate to work with.
Simon Pegg, Nick Frost…
Oh the list is huge!
David Mitchell was one I’d been after for a long long time. And other people that I’d met like Damien Lewis. So it was really nice to have so many people that I’d put down in my notebook of UK folks that I must work with at some point, all of them saying yes. It was really cool.
I had a lot of people in the States saying
“Who is this? Why are we going all the way overseas for this person?”
I was like
“You don’t need to know, just…
Just sign the cheque?
Yeah, just trust me and it’ll be wonderful.
But despite the fact that you have all these great guest stars, the script doesn’t seem like it’s as important on Phineas and Ferb as it is on most shows. You go straight from outline to board – can you talk us through your process and tell us why you chose to work that way?
Well, we start out with a 2-3 page outline that kinda covers the overall arc of the story, and we give that 2 storyboard artists and lock them in a room for 2 weeks, and have them flesh that out and do most of the dialogue. It creates a show that’s a lot more visually driven. You find out that you often need less dialogue, and you don’t end up with pages of words describing things that you may not necessarily be able to draw in animation, that don’t look as good when you draw them as they do written in a paragraph.
And so the show is this amoeba for the longest time, ’til it gets right down to the animatic where it finally starts to take shape. So you have to have a lot of faith in the process, because often the shows don’t look like they’re working at all, right up until the last minute. But it keeps the show full of surprises, you end up getting more people’s voices in there – so many things happen that way that you never would’ve been able to write or think of in advance. And it’s another way of forcing people to let go and let the creative process work.
We continue to hone the jokes and to edit the stuff and do the rewrites, all the way until it’s back in colour we’re still doing stuff. And it sort of becomes part of the philosophy – we don’t at any point say
“No, it’s too late – this is the way it is, even if the joke isn’t working.”
Even if we’re at the very last moment, if the joke doesn’t work, then lets find some other way to do it, and we have a whole crew of creative people come in and make joke pitches and do lines, and we fix stuff all the way up to the very end.
But I don’t know that I’d be happy working on a show that was straight script, or if we did do a script, it would need to be with the understanding that that’s going to be a very flexible document, all the way up to the very end.
Phineas
The execs must love you!
Yeah, it takes a lot of courage to do it that way, especially if you’re the one writing the cheque. So we have to rely on the good judgement and foresight of the folks that are backing this.
Well you’ve rewarded them fairly amply for their faith so far!
So far it’s been good yes!
Ferb
And the other thing that’s interesting about the process, or fairly common these days I suppose, is that you do your animation in China?
Yes, China and Taiwan currently
And it’s hand drawn? Using Toon Boom?
Yeah, I think we’re mostly using ToonBoom now. That’s one of the weird things – when I started it was still paper and animation cels, and now there’s very little paper in the studio at all. I was in a meeting a couple of weeks ago, and I was taking notes and I had a pencil, and I was jotting and scribbling and all of a sudden I thought ‘I’d better sharpen this’ – and it took me the better part of 5 minutes to find a sharpener! I finally went it to someone’s office, and they said
“Yeah, I think I’ve got one of those in a box somewhere”
And I just realised how long it had been since there were stacks of paper, pencil sharpeners, pencils everywhere. Now everyone draws straight in to a Cintiq – but it’s all still hand done, it’s not computer animation in any way.
And was it born of necessity? I mean, from an outsiders point of view, when you’re in Disney, sending the animation abroad is… pretty heartbreaking!
Yeah, that’s absolutely the economy of how this business works – if we had to pay people to animate the show fully in LA, they’d just never be able to afford to put it on the air. That’s just the economy of the world we live in.
But we’ve got people over there who do great work.
Do you go out there and supervise it ever?
Not to supervise it, but we usually go out and meet the folks, and get a follow up trip a little later just to touch base, and see who the people are so that we have a dialogue going. Because we rely on them, you know, we send a whole bunch of stuff out there and it’s got to get translated and interpreted by a whole bunch of these guys, so we rely on them to keep the communication going so they can ask questions.
There’s a lot of stuff we write that when you translate, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. And you don’t notice it at the time, until someone calls you up and says
“What the hell are you talking about!?”
I’ll never forget, years ago, we were working on a show, somebody wrote on their storyboard ‘the character runs into scene, and does a little boogie.’ That’s how they described it. They didn’t even pose out the dance they wanted him to do. I looked at it and said
“How do you think the guy is going to translate ‘boogie’?”
Because that’s going to be translated by a guy who isn’t an animator, who is then going to hand it off to a guy who is an animator, and you’re going to hope that what you get is a dance, but the way this is written, you could get anything!
So you really have to be conscious of how you’re writing things and to keep the translation friendly, if you want to get back anything like what you planned.
Your character design is very distinctive, and really stands out on the channel. Was that what you were looking for – something that stood out – or is that just how you draw?
That was the idea. We resisted changing the characters, mostly because we felt they were unique. We didn’t want to have any designs that made them look like anything else. We knew that if the show was going to be a success, it wouldn’t be because the characters looked cool or trendy or like every other thing that you could find on the internet or tv. And we fought hard to keep them simple.
I mean, if you look at – Bart Simpson is a great example – there’s nothing spectacular about his design. He’s an odd looking, can headed kid with 9 little spikes on the top of his head and he wears blue shorts, plain sneakers and a t-shirt. He doesn’t have a backpack, or trendy trousers, or graphic designs or anything like that. He’s loved and accepted, and people are fans of him because he’s Bart Simpson.
That was the same with our kids. We thought people would accept them whether pr not they have a triangle head, and Ferb has long tested as one of the coolest character out there. He’s got purple pants that come up to his chest, a baggy yellow shirt, floods so you can see his socks – ostensibly he dresses horribly, but everybody thinks he’s cool. So it’s much more about the attitude, and much less about the way the characters look.
And how close is that to the original sketches – is it Dan who did the original sketch on a napkin?
Yeah, we still have the original sketch
Do you? Ebay!
It’s hanging up in his office. He was going through boxes – I think about a year after we sold the show – he was converting his old garage into a studio, and he found the original drawing so he framed it and put it up on the wall.
It’s remarkably, shockingly close. If you look at all the original pitch documents that we have, the final designs of the characters all the way along, are really, really close to what ended up going on the air. Very few changes- some hair colour, I think Doofenshmirtz had blonde hair and brown trousers. We were happy that it looked like it did straight from the get go.