Man, I love this show! It struck me somewhere during the interview with the creators of Phineas and Ferb why I was so smitten. The individuals involved with this show are the same creative minds behind one of my favorite shows of all time, Rocko's Modern Life. No wonder there's a constant undercurrent of hilarity in Phineas and Ferb: The Fast and the Phineas. Sometimes the laughs are less of an undercurrent and more of a firehose blast in your face... The draw of the show for kids is how cool Phineas and Ferb actually are, and how much they rule despite their older sister's attempts to rat them out. The adult viewers will appreciate the subtle humor and the little touches. In one episode, one of the characters actually quotes from The Breakfast Club, for goodness sakes!! Other features of the show that will delight all ages are the musical interludes. We're not talking title sequence music, folks. Several episodes include full-on dance numbers with songs, lyrics, the works... And you'll have to pick the title song out of your head with a long piece of wire days after you've watched the last episode. It is all very catchy stuff, very dialed into popular culture, and very nuanced. Kind of like classic Disney, you could say?

This collection is chock full of episodes. The two-parters are "It's About Time!" and "One Good Scare Ought to Do It!" plus six additional shorts. In "The Fast and the Phineas", the boys soup up their mom's car to race it via remote control on the local speedway. "Lawn Gnome Beach Party of Terror" is the realization of every kid's dream, to build not just a beachy sandbox, but to transform the back yard into Tahiti. "Are You My Mummy" never really exposes a real mummy, but what the boys uncover in a museum is scary enough. "Flop Stars," "Raging Bully," and "Lights, Candace, Action," round out the offering. In every episode we get plenty of laughs from the family pet, Perry the Platypus. To the boys, he's just "Perry," but in Perry's spare time he wages an endless battle against the evil Doctor Doofenshmirtz... who turns out to never be quite so evil, really. The subplots in Phineas and Ferb are awesome, with Perry and their sister Candace. Your sides will literally ache after watching a few of the episodes.

Fans of the show will be happy enough to put these episodes on the shelf and watch them a million times, so all the nifty extras included on this DVD will just push them overboard into a slathering frenzy. We've got the original pitch made by Povenmire and Marsh to Disney, with their explanation of how the pitch and the show came into being. Also consider a gaggle of games included on the disk and appropriately labeled, "Phineas and Ferb 's Homemade Tree Shade Arcade," whatever that means... It's a generous collection and hopefully will keep the fire lit under an audience for this great show. Much of this stuff will fly over the heads of very young kids, but it's fair to say that there's something for almost everyone in Phineas and Ferb: The Fast and the Phineas.