781: Phineas and Ferb Riffstravoganza!

Howdy doodly-do, patrons!  Today I thought I’d do something a little different, to whit, my Riffstravoganza!  I’ve found a heap of really, really short fics to riff, and I’m gonna do a whole pile!  But first, some introduction to the source.

Phineas and Ferb is a cartoon I was recently introduced to when my boys started watching it on Netflix.  A lot of what the boys normally watch consists of things I can barely stand. Things like Bo on the Go, Animal Mechanicals, the new Care Bears, and Johnny Test.  There are other things that they watch which I’m mostly indifferent to, such as Sesame Street, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, Ninjago, and Curious George.  But out of everything they’ve ever chosen to watch Phineas and Ferb is the ONLY thing that I’ve actually liked.

I was really surprised by this show.  While the animation doesn’t really hold up to the quality of Disney’s older shows, specifically those that were part of the Disney Afternoon that I grew up with in the 90s, the rest of the show is surprisingly solid.  The plots, while simple and equationistic, are entertaining and well executed.  The jokes are actually funny, and the show isn’t afraid to mock the fact that it adheres to a very set equation.  The humor itself is based on the more classical concept of situational and visual irony rather than the more common case of modern cartoons relying on shock humor, cheap sight gags, and flat out being gross.  The whole package is very reminiscent of the cartoons I watched when I was a kid, so when the boys started watching it, I became an enthusiastic third viewer.

The basic equation of the show involves 2 threads.  The first is with the two step-brothers, Phineas and Ferb, who create some kind of extraordinary contraption each day to keep themselves busy during their summer vacation.  These contraptions range from a giant, city-sized super-roller coaster, to an interstellar space ship, to a pair of robotic transforming tree-houses that do battle.  Most of these threads also have the sub-plot of their sister, Candace, trying to get the two boys in trouble by exposing the invention to their mother.  These attempts invariably fail when some deus ex machina comes along at the last second and makes the invention inexplicably disappear before their mother can see it.

The second thread is with their pet platypus, Perry, who lives a double-life as a secret agent named Agent P.  His threads involve thwarting the plans of pseudo-evil Doctor Hans Doofenschmirtz to take over the Tri-State area with often ridiculous inventions.  These inventions invariably are named with the suffix of -inator.

That’s pretty much the far-above gist of the whole thing.  If you’ve got Netflix, I recommend giving it a look.  They have the first three seasons and the movie there.  It might also help explain some of the sub-characters that you’ll be seeing in this riff.

Now, on to the Riffstravoganza!  Phineas and Ferb is pretty popular, and deservedly so, but popularity always comes with heaps of terrible fanfiction, and Phineas and Ferb is no exception to this rule.  The thing I noticed about their fanfiction, however, is that a lot of it is pretty short.  Fair enough, most of the episodes in the show are actually divided into 2 mini-episodes each lasting about 10 minutes, so it’s likely that if you wrote your fic as one of those 10-minute segments you could keep it brief.

But not as brief as a lot of these fics.  The number of fics that come in below 500 words is staggering.  I’ve never seen anything like this before.  So, I gathered five of the worst, super-short fics to feature here in a one-shot Riffstravoganza!  I’m going to stop using that word any moment now.  Probably.

So let’s get cracking!

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