Now for something completely different. Since I have a four year old daughter, I have an excuse to watch Disney Channel. One of Zoe’s favorite shows is the cartoon Phineas and Ferb, a show about two brothers who are creative geniuses that take every seven year old boy’s craziest ideas and make them into realities, i.e. building a roller coaster through a major city, going to Mars, traveling through time, making it snow in the summer, etc. In true Saturday morning cartoon style, their sister plays the role of the “villain” that is always trying to “bust them” by showing their mother what they have done. They don’t seem to mind though, and they have even assisted her in the busting on one occasion. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, their pet platypus, is a secret agent that is constantly disappearing to thwart the evil plots of his nemesis, a clueless, evil scientist. In true deus ex machina style, these two plots usually come together with the evil scientist’s new invention inexplicably causing the boys creations to conveniently disappear or otherwise go away. OK, yeah, now that I wrote that all down, it does seem kinda crazy, but it is a fun show to watch. It’s also a heck of a lot more cerebral than Thundercats was!

Anyways, now that you have a general idea of what the show is about, in an episode that Zoe and I just watched, the boys pretend to be detectives on a manhunt for their sister’s lost doll. During the search, they do a montage of detective show parodies. The funniest one is when they parody the opening scene of CSI: Miami. They managed to squeeze in a total of 6 well used gags from both shows in only 21 seconds.