Sorry for the long delay, guys, but I’m back! For this week’s Musical Monday, I’d like to talk about the opening song from the very excellent new Disney Channel movie, Phineas and Ferb: Across the Second Dimension in Fabulous 2D:
For the most part, while I liked all of the songs in the movie just fine, they didn’t seem as catchy as the rest of the songs we hear on the show. But I really love “Everything’s Better With Perry,” not just because it’s a good song, but also because it highlights the relationship between Phineas, Ferb, and their pet platypus. When you think about it, we don’t see them together very much in the actual show, because the Flynn-Fletchers are almost always doing something that’s only loosely connected to the scheme that Perry is trying to foil when he fights Dr. Doofenschirmtz. And because Perry has to keep his status as “Agent P” a secret, it limits how much interaction he can actually have with his owners during each episode.
So, while we definitely know that Phineas and Ferb love Perry, and vice versa, we don’t get to see that love very much. That is, until the movie was released and (SPOILER ALERT) the boys found out that Perry was a secret agent. Phineas felt hurt and betrayed when he learned the truth, wondering if Perry was ever really their pet or if he only used them as a means to hide his identity. Meanwhile, Perry had been desperately trying to stay undercover for as long as possible when the boys met Dr. Doofenschirmtz, because revealing the truth would mean having to relocate and leaving the Flynn-Fletchers for good. The emotional conflict in Across the Second Dimension focuses on Phineas and Ferb’s relationship with their beloved pet, and that’s what makes “Everything’s Better with Perry” so important: it shows how much they love him, and how happy they were before the truth came out and everything got turned upside down.
A lot of other movies use this technique when the plot involves characters trying to regain something. The Toy Story movies, for example, always start out with Andy playing with Woody and his friends before the toys inevitably get separated from them. It helps the audience to emphasize with the characters later on, because we understand exactly what they’re missing and why they don’t want their lives to change.
And “Everything’s Better With Perry” also shows us that Ferb is an excellent singer. But we already knew that! 😀
Of Mice and Magic 