Review: Phineas and Ferb ”Night of the Living Pharmacists”

Spoilers Below

Danville is showing off a new water tower and Major wants Perry to check it out while the kids are building a machine that can turn them into rubber. Meanwhile, Candace is at the mall when she runs into Vanessa Doof and they head out to watch a movie.

Doof ends up capturing Perry and tells him all about his ‘Repulisinator’ that he plans to use to disrupt his brother’s unveiling ceremony. The machine will make the mayor so repulsive that it will allow Doof to take over the entire Danville area. Problem is, the ‘inator’ needs more power to work. What DOES work, is Phineas’ new machine that turns the kids into rubber balls. They bounce all over the city like maniacs and Isabella checks in with the Fireside Girls. We find out that Izzy has to get a patch, but the only way she can do it is if she tells Phineas her feelings for him.

Vanessa takes Candace and the other girls over to Doof Inc. where Doof and Perry are fighting it out which sets off Doof’s machine and zaps his brother like planned. Unfortunately, the ‘inator’ explodes and Perry gets caught again. We find out that Roger gets zapped and turns him into Doof zombies, and that these Doof zombies turn other people into Doof zombies! However, the kids are immune to being turned into zombies because they are rubber,  but everyone else is being turned! While the kids do there best to try and fix the now broken rubber machine so that they can STAY rubber until the crisis is reverted, Vanessa is now being attacked along with her friends.

Perry escapes his trap and starts fighting off the Doof clones when he comes in contact with the original Doof! He runs off to go save Vanessa, while the kids are wigging out about the fact that Isabella is nowhere to be found, so they need to come up with a plan to make sure to save her. Perry glides out and finds out that OWCA is overrun with Doof zombies. The kids learn this the hard way as all of the agents are also zombified.

Back at Doof Inc, half of Candace and Vanessa’s party pals are zombies, and then we cut to all of the kids WITH the Fireside Girls all trying to find out where Isabella is. She eventually shows up, and evidently she knows all about how to stop these zombies from getting any worse which it does anyway because the Fireside girls get caught! Baljeet gets it next, followed by Buford.  Doof saves Perry from annihilation, and the duo heads to Doof Inc. The kids meet up with Candace and Vanessa to do the same thing.  The entire group decides to empty out the new water tower so that all of the zombies can turn back into humans. A new group of zombies show up and they turn Candace, Vanessa, and Perry into zombies which causes Doof to FLIP out.  The kids get to the water tower, but Phineas and Ferb get turned! Isabella is now the LAST one normal in Danville and she has to save the town. She gets tagged, but the water starts spraying and all of the zombies get turned back to normal. But, what about outSIDE of Danville?

 

Phineas and Ferb is world famous for over promoting its cross-overs and specials and at best we usually get a mixed bag. For example, there was a lot made about the recent Lost episode, but it really didn’t turn out that great. So, when I heard that the show was getting a zombie-influenced episode with a bunch of guest stars, I had my reservations. Within the first 15 minutes, they all went away. The producers of the series put together a one-hour tour de force for the franchise that should be the benchmark on how all future episodes will be judged. Were guest stars George Romero, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost awesome? Yes. But they weren’t the point of the episode. The premise we got gave us a suspense-driven comedy the likes of which we’ve never seen in animation before with the exception possibly being Family Guy’s ”And Then There Were Fewer” classic.

EVERY ONE of the principal cast is accounted for, and more over, outstanding. The growing relationship between Phineas and Isabella didn’t seem forced, and you were almost rooting for the two to finally just get hitched. Candace bags her normally complaining-self and in its place is a woman that shows the same brave approach to a horror scenario akin to Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween or Sigourney Weaver in Alien. Perry and Doof continue to flirt with being better friends then they are adversaries. Phineas and Ferb broke every one of its character molds that have been in place the last 100 years and in its place we get a franchise that I think can be reborn and affluent for the franchise’s future. If you have this one recorded and you haven’t watched it yet, fix that.