How old were Phineas and Ferb? What year was it?

Question

The upcoming season 5 of Phineas and Ferb was recently announced as taking place in the summer after the previous seasons. Which got me thinking: when was the previous summer? And if it's fair to assume everyone will be almost a year older in the new seasons, how old were Phineas and Ferb beforehand?

Answer 1

_{Disclaimer: This answer is only based off of the actual show, I'm ignoring the creators' social media and extra content for brevity [sic]}

What Year?

Which got me thinking, when is the previous summer?

Phineas and Ferb rarely provides an authoritative stance on a true timeline, but the most convincing evidence points to the United States in roughly 2007-08. Season 1 was released in late 2007, which happens to be a pretty good guess for the setting of the entire series as the characters don't age over the show's 8-year run (with exceptions discussed later below).

Technology

From a technological perspective, the characters who have cell phones all have mobile "flip" phone models with color displays, indicative of the real life '00s era. In the show, we also see cable television on cathode ray tube display technology in most households, both of which would become more obsolete in the 2010s. We also see plenty of home desktop computers connected to a roughly 2000s internet, which is observable through the design of every website shown on-screen and a specific episode where Heinz Doofenshmirtz tries his hand at online dating, which notably he does on the computer rather than on a smart phone app. We also see pretty consistently across the show that high schoolers have cell phones (Candace, Jeremy, Vanessa, Stacy) while kids younger than that (Phineas and friends) don't have them. A study said in 2012 the average age for kids to have phones was 12, which extrapolated to a few years further back does fit the observations here.

From a canon perspective, there isn't much to go by. In "A Hard Day's Knight", one-off character Dr. Lloyd Wexler's Evil-Con ID says it expires in August 2009, suggesting that the show takes place in about 2008 (both to give room for length of its validity and to account for that day's festival being a Midsummer festival). We also know that the year of the show can't be any earlier than the 1990s, since multiple characters have associated the '90s with the past. Beyond that, we don't get a lot to work with.

How Old Are They?

And if everyone will be almost a year older, how old were the characters beforehand?

Strap in.

Phineas and Friends

IMO, Phineas Flynn and Ferb Fletcher are ~10-12 years old, but there is a lot of ambiguity and some conflicting information.

In "Dude, We're Getting the Band Back Together", we see that Phineas and Ferb's parents met at a Love Händel farewell concert. We know that the group should be disbanding in the 1990s, since Love Händel make specific references to their tours in 1984 and 1993. Importantly, Phineas and Ferb are stepbrothers - meaning the kids are both born before the parents get together -, so we can say that if Phineas was born in 1995, he'd be 12 years old in 2007. Thus, 10-12 for both kids passes the smell test.

School ages

We know that in "Act Your Age", Phineas, Ferb, Buford, and Isabella are all in the same school grade since they go off to college at the same time (Baljeet is already a professor by then, but he says he skipped a lot of grades to finish school super early so it's likely he's the same age as the rest of them). In "Cranius Maximus", Isabella gets trapped by Baljeet and says "I was so looking forward to junior high", which in the United States is typically 7th and 8th grade. This suggests Isabella and the gang by extension are probably about to enter 7th grade. Usually, age cutoffs for beginning schooling in the U.S. are in autumn, and we see Phineas and Isabella's birthdays in episodes that appear to be during The Summer, so we can say that they would be on the young side for their grade level. That would make Phineas 11 before his birthday during The Summer. A couple problems: Isabella could be talking about junior high being several years ahead of them, so they could be a bit younger. It's also possible that the kids were held back or skipped a year, or several other complicating possibilities.

Splitting hairs about Ferb

Also, this school age evidence is slightly less convincing for the case of Ferb: in "Phineas and Ferb Get Busted", we see that when Ferb arrives in the U.S. with Lawrence, Candace appears to be around 6-9 (based off of visual comparison to the kids in the junior Fireside Girls program Lil Sparks), putting Phineas and Ferb at 2-5 years old at the time. Thus, Ferb is plausibly old enough to have begun his education already in the U.K., where most kids start after turning 4. In the U.S., the decision of what grade to enroll a student in lies with the individual school districts, and depending on the Danville school district's policy, this could mean he would be allowed to remain a grade higher than would be usual for an American student his age. Crucially, in the show we also don't find out which stepbrother is older and aren't shown his birthday.

The future is weird

Unfortunately, "Act your Age" complicates the matter even further. The series' penultimate episode claims in its intro to be 10 years into the future, and with Phineas entering college we can assume he is about 17 or 18. Doing the math, that would make him 7 or 8 years old in The Summer.

As a side note, in "Quantum Boogaloo", we see the world of Phineas and Ferb 20 years into the future, and while we don't see them on-screen, we do hear Linda mentioning in passing that Ferb is at Camp David, the U.S. Presidential retreat. Ferb would only be eligible for U.S. president under current law if he were 35 - and a natural-born U.S. citizen, which he is not -, but it's believable the rules could have changed in the interim (alternate theories include Vanessa being president or Ferb being U.K. prime minister).

How old are they really?

Overall, I think the most compelling argument is that Phineas and Ferb and the gang are all 10-12 years old and the intro text for "Act Your Age" was simply inaccurate - that seems to mesh with the characters' personalities and antics, the time period of the show, and their voices and ages relative to other characters like Candace and Stacy.

Candace and Friends

Candace Flynn is 15 years old after her birthday episode, no debate there. "Candace Loses Her Head" shows us her 15th birthday. Later in the show, we also get to see her taking some driving practice with her family a few times, something that is common for American 15-year-olds.

It's likely Stacy and others are her age, but evidence of that is hard to find.

Jeremy Johnson is 16 years old after his birthday, which we know from Candace noting that he is a full year older and a grade ahead of her. Him preparing for college in the Across the Second Dimension movie causes Candace to stress over her relative immaturity.

Parents and Adults

Doofenshmirtz Family

Heinz Doofenshmirtz is 47 years old after his birthday, about the same age as Linda and Lawrence. He grew up in Gimmelshtump, Drusselstein, which is a town preserved in time due to extreme social conservatism, so we get nothing from that. His daughter, Vanessa, is 16 after her birthday, so Heinz must have divorced/been divorced by Charlene sometime around or after Candace's birth (and there are probably a few more specific details for when that split occurred). We do see Roger Doofenshmirtz becoming Danville mayor, which would make sense if he were middle-aged like his older brother Heinz. Finally, Roger explicitly tells us that Heinz is 47 years old in "Quietest Day Ever" ("Well, well, well, Heinz. At the age of 47, you've finally grown into your looks!").

Linda(na)

Linda is probably ~50 years old. We know that Linda and Heinz went out on a date once in what looks like the early '80s, as seen in "What Do It Do", so they're probably the same age. Linda later became pop singer Lindana, and we know she went on tour at least once in 1985 because of the old concert tee she receives at the end of the season 2 Christmas special. She then has Candace around 1992-93, a year after Heinz has his daughter. We also see in "Mom's Birthday Episode" that Phineas describes a 1970s photo of Linda as "young adult", which if she was ~20 in the late '70s would make her about ~50 in the late '00s. Lastly, in "Quantum Boogaloo", we see Heinz and Linda both appearing elderly, which would make sense if they were 20 years older than before.

Bonus: platypus life stages

Perry the Platypus is just over 5 years old during the Across the 2nd Dimension movie, in which it is the 5th anniversary of him being adopted by the Flynn-Fletchers. In real life, mating age for a platypus is 4 years old, so this fits with Perry being an adult for his species. However, he ages inconsistently; Perry is not visibly older in "Act Your Age", when he would be 15. In the wild, a platypus can occasionally live past age 20, but none have ever lived to the visibly old age of 25 we see in "Quantum Boogaloo". This is probably because for a writer, killing him off even for that episode would be a strange decision - from what I recall, I don't know of anyone ever being shown to have died in Phineas and Ferb, aside from long-deceased ancestors and supernatural phenomena like ghosts and spirits.

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