SOUNDTRACK: PHINEAS AND FERB-The Twelve Days of Christmas (2009).
To get you in the mood for the holidays, I present The Phineas and Ferb Twelve Days of Christmas. Each character gets a wish, even Perry. And of course, Ferb’s wish on the 12th day is great.
Obviously, Doofenschmirtz is the comic relief of the song (although most of the wishes are funny in themselves). Doofenshmirtz hilariously wishes for the entire tri-state area and then slowly backs down to one state, admitting he was overreaching at the beginning.
I can’t find a video from the show, but there are plenty cobbled together on YouTube. Like this one. Enjoy!
[READ: July 2012] Time Surfers series
We’re still working through all of the different Tony Abbott series. And this series, Time Surfers, is another early collection of eight books about young kids going on adventures. This series was also difficult to find (although it has recently come back into print (with much better illustrations). The think I have yet been able to figure out about Abbott’s earlier series–they seem like he planned to do more. Or more specifically, they seem unfinished. I wonder if he gave up or if the publishers gave up on him.
So this series seems to have a few arcs in it. New villains emerge, which is interesting, although as C. pointed out, what happened to Vorg from the first four books, he just seemed to go away.
Book #1, Space Bingo starts the series in an interesting way (Tony Abbott’s exposition is always interesting–indeed all of th ebooks open up with a scene the seems to be one thing but is revealed to be something else). Ned Banks has moved to a new city far away from his home and his best friend. He has to start a new school and he’s not too happy about it. His sister has been calling him Nerd instead of Ned and the nickname is starting to spread, especially since such bad luck things are happening to him in school. So he does what any clever kid would do–he creates a communicator (and tells his best friend Ernie how to make one) so that they can talk to each other whenever they want (and not have phone charges!). When Ned turns the communicator on, however, it opens a time portal in his closet and two kids from the year 2099 come flying out.
Roop (short for Rupert) and Suzi are Time Surfers from the year 2099. In 2099, kids rule–kids really do everything (because adults messed everything up before that). And when they burst through the closet door, the invite Ned to join them (because in the way of all time travel condundra, they know him and they know that he will create devices that they use in his future (which is their past).
Ned needs to get used to all kinds of weird things, like bloogball, like the fact that “bagel” is a bad word and that, you know, the earth is in peril from his Legend of Zontar trading cards. I love this detail that the boys’ trading cards actually do play a role in the future, and I love how the evil villain of the book (Vorg) uses the Ned’s actual cards to his advantage.
In Book #2, Orbit Wipeout, Ned reveals that although he saved the world (in book 1) he still gets no respect in his home time. Indeed, his teacher, Mr Smott is giving him more grief than ever, especially when he finds the Legend of Zontar trading cards that Ned is carrying around. Mr Smott has been going on and on about the impossibility of time travel which if course makes Ned laugh but which also gets him in trouble. Mr Smott is a wonderfully wicked teacher.
Book #3, Mondo Meltdown, opens with the exciting news that Ernie, Ned’s best friend, will be visiting Ned for a whole week–no school! Now it’s true that Ernie has been helping Ned on their adventures, but this is going to be normal fun in the present, doing cool vacation stuff. But nothing ever goes as planned and soon enough Vorg is back causing trouble, And the boys have to do something about it. MegaCity is now Vorg City–somehow he has rewritten time and caused Earth as we know it to be…different.
Book #4 is Into the Zonk Zone. The Zonk Zone of the title refers to when you take a time travel trip and then re-materialize too close to yourself in the present. And this book features some major zonk potential. And who doesn’t love when time travelers encounter themselves. This explains some of the crazy klutziness that Ned has gotten up to in the beginning of the book). But the Zonk zone is used to its fullest when it explains the origins of Vorg. This was my favorite book of the series. It was really clever and very exciting. And the time-morphing elements were awesome.
Book #5 is Splash Crash and it changes things up a bit. As the book opens, the Time Surfers are chasing Vorg, but they accidentally burst through the time tunnel and land on a beautiful paradise. All of their sensors read that they are back on Earth in 2099, but everything is different. Could Vorg have changed time to make Earth turn out completely differently…again? But wait, who are these teen? They seem to be frightening all of the kids. Kids are supposed to rule–what’s going on? The teen in charge is called Kurtz–he drinks lot of cans of soda, and he terrorizes the planet. What can the Time Surfers do?
Book #6 is Zero Hour, Kurtz is back and he has deadly plans. Kurtz is has kidnapped Roop–how the kids get him back? I liked this one because although the Surfers don’t kill Kurtz, they are able to neutralize him in a very funny way.
Book #7, Shock Wave, is cool because there is a new villain and that villain has stolen the NASA space shuttle-as it is launched! Ned and his family are at Cape Canaveral, which is a very cool place to set an adventure. The villains are more or less invisible creatures called Plasmicons and they are being controlled from far away by a villain named Zoa an insectoid who has been recently awakened and is ready to take over.
Book #8, Doom Star, is the final book in the series. Zoa is back after the failure of the space shuttle plot. She wants to get the Photon Crystal which she will use to alter time. I liked that this one really played with our minds time-wise. Ned Banks invented bloogball in 2024 and as the book opens they are in the year 2099 playing a holographic version of the game. And yet the “present” in the book is the 20th century, so as we are reading the present, Ned has no idea that bloogball exists. It’s fun to wrap your mind around that. I wonder if C. ever really “got” that concept. And, oh yes, the adventure is very exciting in this one too. Zoa seems to be one of those monsters that would be impossible to beat. I’ll offer one spoiler–the series ends here, but it’s not because the Time Surfers are killed.
This series was very cool. I enjoyed it quite a lot. Although I enjoyed Danger Guys more, there was a lot of cool stuff here (and I do love time travel ever so much). I was a little bummed that there were no waffles in this series–I think of that as Abbott’s jokey trademark.
C. has been reading a lot on his own at bedtime now. I’m very proud, but I’m a little sad as I miss reading with him. I wonder if we’ll get another Abbott series read.
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