Almost every generation will insist that their formative years were the best time in which to grow up, but I don’t think my fellow millennials will disagree when I say there was something truly magical about coming-of-age in the late ‘90s and early 2000s — especially if your parents’ cable plan gave you access to Nickelodeon.
To borrow the parlance of Gen Z, the network’s catalog of programming in those days just “hit different,” running from the gamut from didactic (Hey Arnold!), to cerebral (Jimmy Neutron), to relatable (As Told By Ginger), to slapstick (Angry Beavers), to disturbing (Invader Zim), to pulse-pounding (Rocket Power), to literal wish fulfillment (FairlyOdd Parents). Deric Battiste sums it up best: “They were such a big powerhouse … it was just a good time in entertainment.” Battiste, who you may know better as DJ D-Wrek of MTV’s Wild ‘n Out should know. After all, he performed the theme song for one of Nick’s most beloved, yet short-lived, series: Danny Phantom.
A spectral love letter to superheroes like New York’s friendly neighborhood web-slinger and the spirit-busting crew fronted by Peter Venkman, the saga of half boy/half ghost Danny Fenton (David Kaufman) was created by Fairly OddParents mastermind Butch Hartman and ran for a total of 53 episodes across three seasons between 2004 and 2007. “I was drawing on everything I ever grew up loving: Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Ghostbusters, Iron Man,” recalls the veteran animator. “I love anything with a cool superhero, science-y sort of thing. I still love superheroes to this day. I’d love to do another superhero show someday. I would like to make it as iconic as Danny Phantom.”
Caught between a secret identity and a pair of ghost-hunting parents, Danny relies on help from his two best friends, goth Sam Manson (Grey Griffin) and tech-savvy Tucker Foley (Rickey D’Shon Collins) — and later his sister Jazz (Colleen O’Shaughnessey) — to protect the town of Amity Park from threats straight out of a parallel dimension called the Ghost Zone. Just like Peter Parker, he struggles to balance heroic exploits with life as an average 14-year-old kid, though kicking apparitional butt and cracking jokes at their expense does help with the stress. “Spider-Man’s best power is the fact that he pisses his enemies off by making fun of them while he’s kicking their asses,” explains Steve Marmel, who developed Danny Phantom and had a hand in either writing or coming up with the stories for over half the episodes produced. “As a comedy writer and comic book lover, that’s the sweet spot for me.”
Phantom was, in a word (or two), totally awesome. Known for its serialized narrative, darker themes, richly-designed characters, and dynamic visuals, this cartoon was a clear cut above the rest. It was grand and cinematic, offering up a mature alternative to the carefree adventures of Timmy Turner, Cosmo, and Wanda.
“Danny Phantom was a great age,” Hartman adds. “Timmy Turner was 10 and 10-year-old boys think about different things than 14-year-old boys. Fourteen-year-old boys think about girls and think about relationships. They’re completely awkward, they don’t know what to do with themselves. Now add superpowers on top of that, and you really don’t know what to do. It was Danny having to find himself — not only in his human adolescence, but also in his freshman year as a superhero, too.”
With the cult favorite series ringing in its 20th anniversary this year, I compiled an oral history of with help from 12 key members of the show’s ghostly production…
Interviewees:
- Butch Hartman (creator)
- Steve Marmel (developer)
- Bob Boyle (art director/producer)
- Shannon Tindle (early character designer)
- Stephen Silver (character designer)
- Ben Balistreri (character designer/storyboard artist)
- Guy Moon (composer)
- Deric Battiste, aka DJ D-WREK (theme song artist)
- David Kaufman (voice of Danny Fenton/Danny Phantom)
- Rickey D’Shon Collins (voice of Tucker Foley)
- Grey Griffin (voice of Sam Manson)
- Colleen O’Shaughnessey (voice of Jazz Fenton)
Butch Hartman first got the idea for Danny Phantom while helping his mother move from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Nickelodon had yet to give a full order to FairlyOdd Parents and he decided to create a back-up idea just in case Timmy’s time with his fairies was cut short.
HARTMAN: We sort of ran out of things to talk about after a while. I’m driving and I thought, “Man a boys’ action show would be really cool. Something completely the opposite of FairlyOdd Parents.” I thought, “If I can come up with a cool name for it, that’d be half the battle.” Because I grew up watching Jonny Quest. Jonny Quest, Speed Racer. Those are super-cool names. So I went, “Man, what would be a cool name for a kid?” “Power”? “Dynamite”? “Lightning”? Then “Phantom” seemed like a really cool word. I said, “Billy Phantom? Davey Phantom? What’s his name?” And then finally, I had “Danny Phantom,” which was really alliterative and cool. So I thought of the name first in this moving van.
BOYLE: He called me at the office and was like, “Hey! I’ve got this idea for a show! It’s about some kid with ghost powers.” And I think he said, “He has an owl named ‘Spooky’.” And I was like, “Cool! That’s awesome!” Then he came back and showed me all the initial drawings he had done … and then they evolved from there. Spooky kind of disappeared. I think that was just a brainstorm-y idea that just came and went as the world got built out.
HARTMAN: A couple months later, Fairly Oddparents was doing really, and the heads of Nickelodeon took me out to dinner. They said, “We want to pick up FairlyOdd Parents.” I’m like, “Great! Sounds awesome!” And they said, “Do you have anything else?” I said, “Well, I’ve got this show called Danny Phantom I’m thinking about. It’s about a ghost kid who fights crime. Kind of like a superhero show.” And they said, “Great! Let’s make it!” It was that quick.
MARMEL: Nick had never done a show that had story arcs within them. Everything they were doing was single episodes [with] repeatability. I’ve read comic books since I was eight, so I love sequential storytelling. But you can’t tell the same story over and over again. The surprises are gone. Hopefully, the jokes make you come back a couple times, but in the end … if you go back and read it, you’re doing it out of nostalgia, not surprise. Realizing that, I always considered every season was like a movie. You’ve got a beginning, middle, and end. I always liked arcing it out. You could tell between the arc of his parents, the arc of his sister. Having all those characters grow and evolve over a season, that was just a joy to write. It made two-dimensional animation become three-dimensional storytelling.
HARTMAN: X-Files was kind of a big inspiration, too, because X-Files had one overarching story that they would always touch on, but then there were standalone episodes in there as well. Danny Phantom can be watched as a standalone and there’s also an overarching theme as well. The characters do grow, the characters do learn. Characters will know something in Episode 4 they didn’t know in Episode 1. You can follow the story that way or just watch one-offs.
BOYLE: Butch always has a real clear idea of what he wants to do. He’s got a real strong vision. There are never any big rewrites or, “Oh, this third act isn’t working. Let’s redo the whole thing!” Him and really figured it all out.
Under the supervision of art director Bob Boyle, Stephen Silver (Kim Possible) and Shannon Tindle (The Proud Family) began to flesh out the characters and world of Amity Park (a not-so-subtle nod to The Amityville Horror). Tindle, who was out of work at the time, has never forgotten his gratitude.
TINDLE: I needed that show because when you’re at that point where you’re not getting phone calls, you start to question your value as an artist. And when somebody like Butch calls and says, “I want you to be a part of this. You don’t have to test. You’re on the show if you want to be on this show,” it gives you that confidence.
BOYLE: They would do a bunch of really broad, exploratory stuff and give it to Butch. Then Butch would put his filter over it; drawing the characters in his style, do the combination of the great things Stephen and Shannon had done. He was always like, “I need to be able to draw it in my way,” because he was going to be drawing these characters a bazillion times. It had to be in his shorthand.
TINDLE: I remember our first design debate was, “Four fingers or five fingers?” I was like, “It makes sense for a cartoon like FairlyOdd Parents to go with a classic three fingers and a thumb. But [Danny Phantom characters are more] human, and it’s kind of an action show, so we should give them five fingers.” It was a big back and forth with Butch.
SILVER: Butch wanted the characters to have four fingers and I’m just like, “Nah, you can’t do it that way. You’ve gotta give the characters five fingers. It would look very weird and strange [if they only had four].”
BALISTRERI: When you have characters that start getting a little more realistically proportioned than a FairlyOdd Parents character, and you’re going to be doing crazy dynamic poses, you absolutely need to have hands that you can use for acting. And yet, it still needed to be in the Butch Hartman style, with the certain kind of eyes and the very harsh angles versus curves.
SILVER: We knew it was action-adventure and we knew it was adult style … It took a while in the beginning, because there was just so much play. I did thousands of development drawings, just going back and forth, [asking], “What do these characters look like? Should that character have a cape? No, let’s not put a cape on that character!” That’s how it went. And then you hit the main lineup … I was designing Danny, Jazz, and Sam, and Shannon Tindle designed Tucker, the parents, and Mr. Lancer.
HARTMAN: I could have had a designer come in and completely revamp Danny and do it a whole different way. But I wanted to be able to work on it. I want to be able to draw it. Whenever a kid asks me to draw Danny Phantom, I want to be able to draw it for him. And so, I wanted to be in my style. The style is a little different than FairlyOdd Parents. Not completely but it’s definitely in the same vein. The big difference is Danny has five fingers and Timmy Turner has four. FairlyOdd Parents is way cartoonier than Danny Phantom, but definitely has some stylistic similarities.
TINDLE: I noticed Butch clearly knew what he wanted to do with the show. Sometimes you have that with a creator, sometimes you don’t … It set me on the path of learning what it’s like to actually manage a team and I remember being aware of studying that while I was in the middle of it, hoping that I could do it someday. There was a real sense [that] we were doing something new [and] that Nickelodeon was behind it and was going to support a bigger swing from Butch.
Tindle would end up returning to Disney Channel after less than a year of development, but suggested Ben Balistreri to take his place.
TINDLE: I actually think he did a better job than I was doing. He’s such an incredible talent. But I think he really elevated the stuff that I was doing.
BALISTRERI: [Shannon and Stephen] had done the initial lineup of Danny and the Fentons, Sam, and Tucker. They were [pretty much] there and then it was just a little bit of tweaking. From that point on, all the individual ghosts per episode… Usually, Stephen and I would alternate. We had a really collaborative relationship. Stephen was like, “Man, I want to do Skulker!” [I was] like, “You take it, man! Let that be your baby.”
SILVER: It was one of the greatest experiences I had working at Nickelodeon in general. The studio itself was just so conducive to animation artists and bright and vibrant. I made some great friends and built some long-lasting relationships. Ben and I just had a blast working together. We would play video games if we finished our artwork.
BOYLE: The funnest part was Silver and Ben in the same room. Those two were such a powerhouse and and hilarious together — like an old married couple. They just got along so well.
In addition to his work as a character designer, Balistreri also added storyboards to his docket.
BALISTRERI: A lot of TV character designing is extremely tedious, technical, and somewhat boring artwork. As an example, Danny gets covered with goop on his face and the storyboard has a rough indication to that. You, as a character designer, have to draw Danny Phantom with goop on his face, or the underside of somebody’s shoe, or the back view of somebody. Things that just aren’t necessarily [exciting]. You’re not coming up with wild, cool ghosts every episode. It got kind of tedious, so I asked Butch and Bob if they’d give me a chance storyboarding …
Butch, God bless him, took a lot of time early on to help me work towards becoming a better storyboard artist. Boarding on the show was an absolute true love for me. It’s an insane amount of work. Character design is relatively easy, but storyboarding in TV is one of the most grueling jobs the industry has — back then and even more so now. [It involves] countless sleepless nights at the studio. It’s an insane amount of work and yet, it’s so gratifying and rewarding. As an artist, you get into this to tell stories, and Butch and Steve were just so giving in terms of letting the board artists contribute ideas and visuals to the show. I very rarely in my time have met two people who were more generous and meant more to my career than those guys.
MARMEL: We had the A-Team of character design, and it shows. You could just see how much everybody loved everything about [Danny Phantom]. Where I would get a little crazy about stuff would be like, “No, the fight needs to be X, Y, and Z because this is how I saw it in an X-Men book when I was 8-years-old! You have to stop the action here for the quip like it’s a panel and then let’s get back into this super-cool fight scene.” Anytime you could stop the music, stop the action, drop a joke, call Vlad a “fruit loop,” and then get right back into it, that was the perfect Danny Phantom fight for me.
SILVER: The style is still strong and great for animation. The simplicity of it, which led to other people [emulating it], especially with Total Drama Island, which came out after Danny Phantom. I get a lot of people asking me if I designed that show, because it’s so similar. But it’s like, “No, it was influenced, for sure.” [Danny is] great-looking show and holds up after all these years.
BALISTRERI: Everybody was so in love with making the show [and] I think that kind of passion somehow magically oozes its way into the final product.
The viewer was reminded of that tender love and care at the top of each episode with eye-popping title cards, each of which paid homage to classic horror and sci-fi movie posters from the 1950s and ‘60s. Naturally, composer Guy Moon incorporated that old B-movie standby, a theremin, into the score where possible. “In some sense, ghost equals theremin for musical language,” he notes.
BALISTRERI: The initial idea for [the title cards] was Stephen Silver’s. Every show has their own signature title card. FairlyOdd Parents had a simpler style for theirs and and I remember Steve and I being like, “Man, it would be cool if we had something different.” I remember him saying, “Oh, it’d be really neat if they were reminiscent of old ’50s horror posters.” You can probably look at almost every one of those title cards and find a corresponding movie poster that we were paying homage to.
HARTMAN: It was really cool to do a 1950s horror movie [approach inspired by] It Came from Outer Space or Forbidden Planet. I was like, “That’s really neat. Let’s keep doing that.” And they really seem to have hit a chord, which is nice.
When it came to the main voice cast, Hartman settled on David Kaufman (Danny Fenton), Grey Griffin as (Sam Manson), Rickey D’Shon Collins (Tucker Foley), Colleen O’Shaughnessey (Jazz Fenton), Kath Soucie (Maddie Fenton), Rob Paulsen (Jack Fenton), Ron Perlman (Mr. Lancer), and the late Martin Mull (Vlad Plasmius).
KAUFMAN: In a lot of ways, Danny is me. I definitely tried to age him down because I was a little past high school when I started doing it. But luckily, my voice has always had a kind of youthful sound to it. So I just had to age it down a little bit, but I definitely sympathized with the character because I was sort of that kid in high school — not one of the popular kids, not one of the jocks. I definitely could commiserate with the idea of being popular with the little group I had, but not with the school at large. I could relate to being an underdog, an outsider, in a sense.
GRIFFIN: I was a goth girl. I shopped thrift stores exclusively, mostly because I grew up sort of poor. So I pretended like it was a choice when really, it’s probably all I could afford. I did a lot of Army/Navy surplus stuff, and my hair was jet-black. It’s still black. I wanted a tattoo on my neck, but instead, I drew a spider on my neck in black eyeliner. I wore it with lots of powder and red lipstick and this black vintage dress with combat boots, of course.
COLLINS: Keep in mind, I was 17-18 when we did that. It was me being me, but it was also trying to find a specific range that worked. A lot of times in animation, the voices need to be distinct. So if you watch an animated show with your eyes closed, you don’t have to look at the screen to be like, “Oh, that’s Danny” or “Oh, that’s Tucker,” or “Oh, that’s Sam.” So finding a pitch that resonated was the key point for me [in] getting Tucker’s voice right. You try to bring as much of you into the character as possible. And also, the animators, do a really good job of finding little quirks in your personality and bringing that to the character as well.
O’SHAUGHNESSEY: I had a younger sister and an older brother. Being the middle child, but the oldest girl, I’ve always had that nurturing thing in me with animals, babies, my little sister … It’s always fun when your character gets to be in the know and gets brought into the the secret superhero group. She was already a protective older sister, and now she’s got to be extra protective.
According to the actors, nearly every episode was recorded with the talent in-studio at Nickelodeon’s headquarters in Burbank.
KAUFMAN: If I was the head of any network, I would mandate that all of our animated series are recorded with the entire cast in the studio, so they can see each other and relate to each other and play off each other. It lends itself to richer performances between the actors.
GRIFFIN: It was like an old radio play. We would have so much fun goofing off together and laughing.
COLLINS: Our break room was always a riot. You get me, David and Grey in the same room between takes and we’re just laughing about stuff. I looked forward to the breaks, because that’s the time you really got to show your personality. Butch would come and hang out with us for 15-20 minutes, and then we’d have to go back in the studio, and it was all business. But the break room was when you really got to hang out with everyone and get everyone’s personality and really bond. That’s the stuff that transferred over to the recording sessions.
O’SHAUGHNESSEY: I was working with all these icons in the voiceover world, and I was fairly new. Throughout my career, I’ve gotten to reunite with them and work with them again. It’s absolutely [in the] Top Five for sure.
Aside from the core cast, Phantom often welcomed a number of well-known guest stars like Mark Hamill, Mathew St. Patrick, David Carradine, Jon Cryer, and Michael Dorn to voice Danny’s foes.
SILVER: Sometimes we’d design the character first and then they’d pick the voice actor after that. Sometimes, the voice actor was picked prior and then we would design a character based on the voice.
HARTMAN: We wanted to have a few celebs on there. We had Patricia Heaton, who did the voice of the Lunch Lady. She was our very first ghost. And then we had Mark Hamill do the voice of Undergrowth. We had a bunch of really fun celebs come in and do some ghost voices for us, which I thought was a blast. Once you’re doing a show on a network, it’s easier to get them. You have bigger connections when you’re at a big network like Nickelodeon or Disney. Nine times out of 10 they’ll agree to do it, especially if they have children.
KAUFMAN: It’s quite cool to walk in and they’re in the lobby. Luke Skywalker’s sitting there and now we’re gonna sit and talk about the traffic driving over to the studio.
BALISTRERI: I designed Undergrowth [and] boarded that episode as well. When [Hamill] came into his record, I had a Luke Skywalker figure hanging up on the wall. I’m a Star Wars psycho nerd. My entire office at Nickelodeon was just covered in Star Wars stuff. Butch was super cool. He’s like, “Yeah, sure, come on over to the record and get him to sign it for you!” [Hamill] was just sitting there, right in the lobby in front of me, and I had it. He was reading a script, and I was like, “I can’t just get in there and [interrupt].” So he went into the recording booth and I went in there, and Butch is looking at me [because] I just was too chicken to do anything. Butch finally he just grabbed it from me and he’s like, “I’ll get him to sign it. Don’t worry.” [And he did]. I think it says, “Ben, go Force yourself, [signed] Mark Hamill.”
BEWARE! A superhero is only as good as their villains, and Danny’s eclectic roster of adversaries can stand toe-to-toe with the best comic baddies ever created. Much of the credit goes to Silver and Balistreri who let their imagines run wild when it came to designing the likes of Skulker, Box Ghost, Ember McLain, Undergrowth, Pariah Dark, Technus, Walker, and Danny’s top arch-nemesis: Vlad Plasmius.
MOON: FairlyOdd Parents is an uplifting show. Danny’s uplifting, too, but it has a dark side. In FairlyOdd Parents, even Darth Vader was a goofball. There’s no darkness in FairlyOdd Parents. With Danny, you’ve got some villains that get pretty nasty.
HARTMAN: Batman has a rogues’ gallery of villains, Spider-Man has a rogues’ gallery, and Danny Phantom has a rogues’ gallery. In fact, I’ve always wanted Danny Phantom to go on even longer because there are so many other cool villain ideas. I’ve done several YouTube videos where I go, “Hey, here would be a cool Danny Phantom villain if we ever did the show again!” [I’ve got] really killer ideas for ghosts. Some ghosts are super-serious, some are super-lame and funny. They each have different levels of threat. [Sometimes] the script would say, “Danny fights a lame throwaway ghost, [before the] big villain.” The Box Ghost came out of that, he was just a random ghost we needed in the show. Now he’s one of the most popular ghosts from the show.
MARMEL: The Box Ghost was pretty much the equivalent of Condiment King in the Batman universe. But heroes are defined by their villains and the villains should be a dark mirror to your hero. That’s why Vlad was so great. He did everything with those powers that you don’t do … [Part of] his villain origin story is that they would not sell him the Green Bay Packers. The reason he’s pissed about that, is I am a die-hard Green Bay Packers fan. Every time I do a show, I try and drop a little bit of a reference on it. But man, we got so close to being sued by the Packers, that I’ve never been more proud. Not a lot of people know I bought a brick at Lambeau Field. You could buy a brick and put it in the field and there’s a brick there from Vlad Plasmius that says “Someday, I will rule.” It’s really hard to find.
HARTMAN: I love when Vlad Plasmius shows up because I love Danny having a Lex Luthor. I love any main, overarching uber-villain. I love him trying to win Danny over to his side, sort of like a Darth Vader-type deal.
SILVER: [Ben and I] always had just such a great time splitting it up and coming up with the looks of these characters and and turning them into what they are. One of my favorite characters was Skulker. I had a lot of fun designing him. Vlad Plasmius was a really cool one, having to design [his two forms].
KAUFMAN: I really liked the the story that went on between Vlad and Danny, how they became these nemeses. It turns out Vlad and Danny have much more in common than they ever realized — or that Danny realizes. That was another example of how the writing just got more complex than you would imagine it would have.
BALISTRERI: The one I did that became super popular was Amber McLain. She took on a life of her own when that episode appeared. Usually, what would happen is I would do maybe five or six rough sketches [with] totally different variations of a character. Then we’d show them to Butch and he would do some draw-overs or [offer feedback] Then you just narrow it down. But Ember was one of those ones where it was the first drawing I ever did of her. I gave her red flaming hair, as opposed to the blue she’s got now. This would have been the late ‘90s or early 2000s when we designed that; I remember I did a cross between KISS and Gwen Stefani. That one went through instantly and she became this massive success.
There was a great big flash and everything just changed on April 3, 2003 when Danny Phantom premiered after Nickelodeon’s annual Kids’ Choice Awards ceremony. The debut episode (“Mystery Meat”) instantly distinguished the show as something unique and unlike anything kids were seeing in animation at the time.
KAUFMAN: [When] they sent me the whole script, I thought it was fun and interesting. But I thought it was a little weird. I was like, “What…? He’s a half-ghost and the cafeteria lady is a ghost and she’s haunting the school? Is she a monster?” I really wasn’t sure what it was, but once we got together with the cast, I really got the sense of what a cool project it could be and where it could go.
BOYLE: Some of the early [episodes] were fun because we were just figuring stuff out. That’s the fun part in creating these worlds — everything is new. What does a refrigerator look like? What does a car look like? I wanted it to be something more complicated, more detailed, more angular. Definitely a more somber kind of palette. Where OddParents was really bright (the fairy aspect of that was all pinks and purples), we wanted to keep [Phantom in] grays — as though Amity Park was almost always in fall or winter. No big bright-blue skies. And then when the fights happened, when the ghosts appeared, the palette totally changed on a dime and turned it into these glowing ghost colors. That was my big charge, “Let’s not make this normal colors. Let’s really push it [with] all these cool details in the background.”
MOON: I’m not sure if we had a conscious conversation about it, but I definitely wanted to make it as musically diverse from FairlyOdd Parents as possible. The home base style of FairlyOdd Parents is like big band jazz, but then it goes wherever it needs to go, depending on the story of the episode. Danny [on the other hand] was very specific, much more tied to the style of the show in a longer arc situation. The action music would stylistically change sometimes if there was a reason to change it, but most of the time, it was that driving back beat with the drums and the guitar playing that main title.
If I look back, there were two different types of scenes calling for different types of score: action scenes and happy-go-lucky scenes when Danny wasn’t a a ghost at at school or at home (when he was just dealing with regular life). For me, that was definitely the trigger that said, “Okay, what kind of music do we go into now?” It’s like black and white. As Danny starts going ghost, it’s action music, pretty much until he stops. Once in a while, if there’s a lot of dialogue, sometimes he would get in a banter with with the villains, so [the music] would calm down for those spots. But when he was flying around, man, it was just full throttle.”
BALISTRERI: Cinematics in TV nowadays are expected because everything has become so cinematic. But in those days, it was a little more revolutionary to see things like the meat monster comes in and the camera slightly adjusts up; then we would look down and see the shadow of the meat monster going over the top as you’re pulling back to emphasize the scale of it. Things like that are kind of commonplace now, but [storyboard artist] Eric [Wiese] would do it and you’d be like, “Oh my God! This is more epic in its feeling!”
There’s a lot of people in animation that sort of fight the idea that something hyper-stylized can’t also draw in people emotionally. [They argue] if something’s too cold and too angular — and the look is overpowering in its style — people won’t empathize with the pathos of the story. Danny is one of those rare cases that proves you can have both. I give it a lot of credit to [Marmel] for his writing on that. He could write stuff that would draw people in emotionally. When you first think of Danny Phantom, you think of cool ghosts and goo, but that emotion can still withstand that hyper-style.
When the show was picked up for a second season, the decision was made to give Danny an official logo, which was easily retconned (a classic comic book device) onto his suit in the Season 2 premiere: “Memory Blank.”
SILVER: Butch came into the office and said, “Hey, marketing feels that Danny Phantom has to have a logo.” So he gave it to Ben and I just to start coming up with. Butch ended up settling on my logo, which was that “DP.” I designed that thinking about Pac-Man.
Of course, no discussion of Danny Phantom would be complete without mention of its insanely iconic theme song, which lays out the show’s premise in less than a minute and which most fans can probably recite from memory in a single breath. Hartman wrote the lyrics and Moon the music. Per the latter, the song went through two different iterations before its third and final incarnation.
The first version had no lyrics and was “just too dark” and “and kind of a little scary” for young viewers. The second iteration, which you can listen to below, had a melody and lyrics sung by Moon, but the network still wasn’t satisfied. That’s when Deric Battiste (aka DJ D-Wrek) was brought in to record the rap we all know and love, though he would like to set the record straight once and for all. The opening lyric is not “Yo, Danny Fenton,” it’s actually “Young Danny Fenton.”
HARTMAN: I really wanted a theme song that told the story. But I [also] really wanted a theme song that when a kid heard it from the next room, he would run into the room [because] he would know, “That’s my show!” When I was a kid, I grew up with the Flintstones and Spider Man. Those [theme] songs are so cool and they live in a kid’s heart. I thought, “Man, we need a song that lives in a kid’s heart.” I really wanted something cool, I wanted a killer bass line. That’s the first thing I thought of.
MOON: That bass line was there from the get-go, but it was just real heavy in the first version. It ended up being a little lighter and bouncier. [For the second one], I sang a melody that was smoother over all the percussive stuff. They liked that better, but they said, “We just something more modern.” So we said, “Okay, let’s put a rap on it.”
BATTISTE: They gave me lyrics and I went through it. I had to take out some words, add some words, and do different things; just put it in a cadence that made sense for the track that they had presented to me. I remember rhythmically, “Young Danny Fenton / He was just 14 / When his parents built a very strange machine.” It was just pretty staccato. There was no groove to it. That’s not Guy or Butch’s fault. It’s just a cadence. When you rap, you have to find pockets where the music isn’t that become the other instrument in the track. [For example] “When it didn’t quite work his folks, they just quit…” I think it originally said, “When it didn’t quite work, his folks just quit.” Lyrically, in the original one, that didn’t flow right to me. There were different rhythms and things that we played with that ended up staying in the record … I remember it being real. There was no pressure. We were just three guys hanging out in the studio. Within the parameters that they needed, they gave me the freedom to rap, which was a natural thing for me since I’d been learning and memorizing and writing rap since “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. It was a really good experience.
MOON: Derek was able to take it and clarify it and trim down a bit of that intense rap vernacular that wouldn’t translate to more mainstream viewers. He was just perfect and did it instinctually … [He was] like, “How do I need to work with you guys? How are we going to make this best thing?”
BATTISTE: It’s palatable for kids. The music is fun, it’s up-tempo, it’s exciting. Then you hear, [whispering] “He’s a phantom.” If I’m a 10 year-old-kid, I don’t care what I’m doing. If I hear “He’s a phantom,” I’m looking up to see where that’s coming from. [Also], you could understand what I was saying. There wasn’t a bunch of slang in it … Kids could understand the lyrics. I told a story of somebody that kids wanted to be like.
MARMEL: [You] explain the show, so you don’t have to explain the show every time [it airs]. And that being said, the song’s a banger. I think that’s what makes it iconic. Same thing with FairlyOdd Parents. “Alright, here’s the show in 30 seconds. Can we just get onto a fun story now so we don’t have to explain it again?!”
Throughout Phantom’s three-season run, fans seriously connected with the blossoming relationship between Danny and Sam.
HARTMAN: People really respond to that boy/girl love affair thing and that was sort of unintentional. We were just writing the show. Sam was Danny’s best friend and as we were going, we were like, “There should be something here between them. They’re working together all the time. Obviously, they would probably be attracted to each other. There’s got to be something there.”
KAUFMAN: The writing of Danny Phantom ended up going into more relationship-oriented stories and got a little deeper. They treated the relationships between the characters with a little more reverence and complexity. That did influence my performance, because I was able to get more real with the performance and relating to scenes with Grey as Sam. We were able to go places I didn’t really necessarily think we would ever go to when we were first starting it.
MARMEL: I liked Valerie [Cree Summer] and Danny, because those are characters that had dimension. If it was up to me, Valerie and Danny would have been together for most of the season instead of a one-off and I would have had a love rectangle going on between Danny, Valerie, Sam, Tucker, and Dash [S. Scott Bullock] just for good measure, so you always had that tension of Peter Parker, MJ, and Gwen Stacy. I could’ve done that for seasons. But I loved being able to have characters where you’re like, “I hope they hook up!” or “I don’t like this relationship at all.”
Danny Phantom came to an end on August 24, 2007 after a truncated third season loosely mapped out by Marmel, who left Nickelodeon to work on Disney Channel originals like Yin Yang Yo! and Sonny with a Chance. He did, however, have a hand in setting up Danny’s at-home rivalry with Vlad when the latter is elected mayor of Amity Park.
MARMEL: I was basing that on Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, which is a comic book run where Lex Luthor is President. He’s using all of his powers to make Superman’s life miserable and turn other heroes against him because he is the law and you have to respect authority, even if that authority is a terrible person. That’s the one thing I wish I could have been a part of, because I was really excited about the third season, of turning the world against Danny, and then him redeem himself at the end and be a hero.
Clocking in at 50-minutes, the double-sized series finale — “Phantom Planet” — saw Danny revealing his secret identity to the world, teaming up with his ghostly adversaries, and finally hooking up with Sam when an asteroid threatens to destroy all life on Earth. The decision to cancel the show came down to a number of different factors, including ratings that simply could not compete with Nick’s other IPs.
BALISTRERI: I don’t think [Danny Phantom] ever really moved the needle, ratings-wise. Nickelodeon at that time — and even to this day — still suffers a little bit from the fact that SpongeBob is such a juggernaut. We never heard this officially, but it felt like common knowledge amongst everybody that if a new show came out and a rerun of SpongeBob beat it in its ratings, Nickelodeon was always like, “Well, why would we invest in this new show? We can just keep running old versions of SpongeBob or Fairly OddParents. They’re doing better numbers than a new thing like Danny Phantom.”
BOYLE: That’s the way network television works, you just never really know. I think with Phantom, there’s a smaller audience, but a really passionate one. [Whereas] a show like OddParents is big and broad. Comedy plays to a wider audience.
GRIFFIN: Even after we got canceled, there were so many people picketing in Times Square, outside of the Viacom building. I was like, “Wow, they really love the show!” That made an impact on me. Danny Phantom fans are just so hardcore about it at cons, and they’ve only grown in number. I used to sign maybe 10 Danny Phantom things at a con, and now I would say at least 25% of the autographs I sign are Danny Phantom-related.
COLLINS: The really cool thing about animation is unless you’re a real fan of the show, it would be hard to spot me on the street, unless I’m at a convention like Comic-Con. When I was in San Diego a few years ago, there were a few people that were like, “Rickey?” And I was like, “Wait, what?” I was just there to enjoy myself. So unless you’re in those settings, it’s really hard to have fan interaction, but I have had a few in those settings. It was actually really cool. [They were] huge fans of the show. I took some pictures with the people and signed some stuff for them. When it happens, it’s really cool because you they’re actual avid fans of the show.
KAUFMAN: My son came running downstairs one morning, and he was like, “Dad! Lil Nas is talking about you on TikTok!” And I’m like, “Wait, what?” He goes, “Well, he’s talking about Danny Phantom.” Lil Nas was talking about how he had this crush on Danny Phantom when he was 14-years-old. My son was like, “You have to duet it!” I had no TikTok followers. I really wasn’t that into it. I had like 40 followers or something. Well, I duet it and by the end of the day, I had like 11,000 followers.
O’SHAUGHNESSEY: I still see on social media, “Bring Danny Phantom back!” It was just such a unique show, so smart and fun. Then I go to these conventions and meet people who tell me how much it meant to them, and how they could relate to it, and how they wished that we had more seasons. I’m certainly not in charge of those things, but, of course, I would love it if they did.
HARTMAN: Any creator wants their show to go multiple decades. How long has South Park been going? How long has The Simpsons been going? You want your idea to keep going; you love working on it, you still get paid to work on it. I would have loved Danny Phantom [to continue]. I wrote the series finale because I was actually given a heads-up that we were going to be stopping after three seasons. They gave me several months notice and I’m like, “Okay, got it. Sorry to hear that,” but at least I had time to formulate a sort of semi-finale. I wanted to do something huge. I always had this idea of Danny saving the world by turning it intangible. I thought that was a kind of a crazy idea. We ended up having to make it work, and it worked pretty well.
MOON: The last one … was so uniquely heartfelt … Danny is basically saying goodbye to Sam and they kiss. I got goosebumps scoring that scene.
Aside from a brief crossover event with FairlyOdd Parents, T.U.F.F. Puppy, and Bunsen is a Beast back in 2017, the Danny Phantom brand has lain quite dormant, save for a number of videos on Hartman’s YouTube channel, which has helped keep fan excitement alive by wondering where the series could go in the future.
If the series were to get the reboot treatment, what is the optimum direction? Do you simply pick up where the story left off? Do you age the characters up and pass the legacy off to a new generation? Or, and this one is the most controversial of all, do you adapt it for live-action?
HARTMAN: I definitely have ideas for the future, should we go on. Spoken things have definitely happened. Nothing for sure, at all. I do like the fact that Nick is rebooting a lot of their classic properties. Perhaps Danny will have its chance someday. I think that’d be wonderful. The fan base is certainly there … They come up and say, “Is Danny coming back?” I say, “If it did come back, what would you want to see? Would you want to see an animated version or a live-action?” Eight out of 10 say animated. I myself would absolutely love a live-action one. Why not? If they made a live-action Spider-Man, we can make a live action Danny Phantom, right? I’d love to see both versions. I do think if we [went] animated again, we should probably try and do a little bit more of an anime-ish type of style. I’m not saying full-on anime, but maybe a combo of my style and anime.
BOYLE: I think either animated or live-action could work. It’d be cool to see live-action, for sure, just with the technology you could do now. It would also be great to see a more contemporary styling of Danny Phantom, because styles have changed so much. The Phantom/OddParents style is so iconically ‘90s and early 2000s, but it’d be really cool to see a more anime version of Danny Phantom.
MARMEL: The thing that’s great about the show, is it follows a kid’s journey of being empowered for the first time in his life and then having to juggle that power and responsibility — à la Spider Man. I would want [a reboot] to be — I don’t want to say darker — but I would want it to have so much more depth. Because I think younger audiences get that depth earlier in life now. A 7-year-old from 20 years is not a 7-year-old right now. They’ve got the world coming through their phone, so they understand ramifications. If it comes back, I hope it comes back deeper.
SILVER: I don’t think doing a live-action would serve it. People have a fondness for the characters they grow up with. It’s like a stamp that gets ingrained in you, and it’s even the voices of the characters. So all of a sudden, you’ve got these actors who are playing these people, the voices sound different, and they’re not really them [in a sense]. Maybe you could make them a few years older, but it doesn’t need to be like they’re married now and change the whole thing again. You can introduce a whole bunch of new characters, but I think it could be a continuation.
BALISTRERI: Animation is the superior form. The style, the beauty of the artwork, the way that you choreograph all that artwork is such a superior version of seeing something, that I don’t want live-action. It bores me. As far as what I would love to see, though, I would absolutely chomp at the bit for any part of it, even if I didn’t get the opportunity to work on it. As a fan getting to watch, I would love to see a straight-up continuation. I felt like the show got cut off at its legs before we really got to address a lot of really interesting things about the character relationships, especially between Danny and Sam. I’ve seen Butch do a lot of, “What would Danny Phantom look like as an adult?” The idea of, “Would you just age up to the show?” I think that could be fun, but I think I would almost rather go back in time and continue on with the show. I just want to see more of what we had, personally.
KAUFMAN: If we did go back, I think it would be cool to see them a little older, maybe in their early 20s, in college or just out of college, and starting to be faced with life decisions. How does Danny gel having to be this superhero, but also live a normal life as he gets older? It would open up the world of the show a little more.
GRIFFIN: I think it’d be great to have Danny and Sam together as adults and their kids thinking that they’re the ones who are doing all the ghost stuff, but have us secretly know what’s up. That’d be fun. People want Danny and Sam to finally get together. I told Butch, “I know that Nickelodeon owns the rights to it but do a takeoff! Do it as a parody and call it, ‘Daniel Phantom,’ or, ‘Danni Phantom’ with an ‘I’ and do the gender-bending version.’ As long as I’m involved!”
O’SHAUGHNESSEY: I don’t love the turn-an-animated-something-into-live-action [trend]. But either way, continue where they left off or … [it] would be really interesting to see where they all are 10 years later. That might be really fun. I think at this point, that might be the better way to go. I’d like to see [Jazz be] a more an integral part of the team. Maybe she steps in the Ghost Zone portal, gets powers and then fights alongside him? I just think it would be fun to see where they go after after graduation. Is there stuff that happens on a college campus? Do any of them get married? Does Danny have a kid and pass the powers on to him? You never know…
COLLINS: Obviously, whatever Butch does is amazing, and it’s always top-tier. With the technological advances we’re in now, with all the social media we have, I think there would be great opportunity for story … Tucker would be above and beyond and ahead of the curve. Can you imagine Tucker and Danny with an Instagram? Are you kidding?! That’s something I would love to see. I wonder how many followers he would actually have.
Speaking of a potential live-action project, Hartman made headlines earlier this year when he suggested Spider-Man: No Way Home actor Tom Holland for the role of a flesh and blood Danny. TMZ immediately seized on the viral comments and reached out to Kaufman, who mentioned Noah Schnapp and Billie Eilish for Danny and Sam, respectively.
KAUFMAN: There seems to be a lot of different schools about that. Some people say it’d be really cool and try to figure out who would play who. And then there’s this other group that’s like, “No! They’ll ruin it! No live-action!” So as far as a live-action, I think it would have to be done the right way.
HARTMAN: I would love to see Tom Holland [in the role]. There are some other amazing actors that were suggested. [I mentioned] Tom only because I’m such a huge Spider-Man fan. I’m like, “Man, Tom Holland would be great.” He may be a bit too old for Danny right now. Tom would be great in any capacity, but there are some other actors who would be great, too. Danny is 14, he’s a young young kid, so it’d be someone closer to that age, probably.
MARMEL: I would like to see a role that breaks somebody amazing. Because if they do it right, that’s going to be their character for the next five or six years … I’d rather find this amazing actor and then have everybody go, “That guy was Danny Phantom!” That’s just more exciting to me because then you get to see somebody take the character, put their unique spin on it, and then grow with the character. It’s just a different way of looking at it. If I saw a Danny Phantom movie, I want to be surprised by who Sam is, who Tucker is. I want to see somebody take that character and make it better than anything I could have thought of.
GRIFFIN: I think Jenna Ortega would be great [as a live-action Sam]. I’d want to be the mom. I’m Mexican and Irish, so I would want to be the mom.
Whether Danny Phantom is rebooted or not, there’s no denying its profound impact on the cultural landscape. One could even say it’s gained a second, almost spectral, existence.
KAUFMAN: So many women will come to me and go, “I was in love with Danny Phantom! He was my first crush. My very first crush was on a cartoon character.” Danny really had this effect on people and if my voice somehow contributed to that, then great. Of everything I’ve done, that is probably the one character or project that had the biggest thumbprint on the cultural zeitgeist. Anytime an actor can have place in the universe or the world like that, it’s icing on the cake.
GRIFFIN: Everybody had those great friends that you’d go off on little adventures with. You sort of had a secret life in high school with a tight-knit group [where] you knew all the ins and outs. There’s just something special about those formative friendships. I think everybody can relate to that; the little inside jokes and stuff under the surface. There happens to be a ghost world [in our show], but we all have our version of that, whether it’s a secret place in the woods or somebody’s house where you meet up and just talk about your problems. It feels safe to you, it feels like you could just be yourself.
COLLINS: Aside from Danny being a ghost, it’s a coming-of-age story. It’s everything we go through in high school growing up — maturity, friendships, dealing with teachers, dealing with parents, dealing with siblings, dealing with bullies at school, finding your way as a young adult. That’s something every generation can relate to you, no matter how old you are and no matter when you catch on to the show.
O’SHAUGHNESSEY: It’s sort of that classic nerdy, awkward kid who has these special gifts. Something about that kind of storyline speaks to people. It’s like Peter Parker. Who doesn’t love superhero stories and who doesn’t see themselves in those characters? He’s so relatable and he’s just this goofy kid. It’s like, “I was a goofy kid! Why can’t I do that? When am I gonna get bit by a spider go into a Ghost Zone?”
SILVER: The show has really blown up over the last 10 years, as far as people cosplaying and all that. It just seems to somehow keep growing and getting bigger and getting more of a fan following. I’m just blown away by it. I’m seeing these young kids who weren’t even born when the show was created, who have watched it and they’re expressing how this was their childhood. I totally get it, because my childhood was Scooby-Doo! and Hanna-Barbera and Tom and Jerry. It’s really cool when they come and say, “Man, this was my childhood!”
BOYLE: A kid with ghost powers. That’s a pretty awesome concept, straight-up. And then the character relationships, because it’s ripe for people creating their own stories with it. It definitely had that mythology built into it where fans could really get into it. They’ve created their own fan fiction and kept Danny Phantom alive for a long time.
TINDLE: To me, it’s that mix of [genres]. It bends genres a bit. You’ve got the comedy, but you also have the supernatural and the action. Typically a studio wants one thing, “This has got to be a straight comedy or this has got to be a straight action show.” Rarely do you get a show like this that bends it and to me, that’s why it endures. It’s a lot of things to people. There’s tension, because there’s a bit of a thriller vibe to it. There’s that supernatural [appeal], especially when you’re a kid. Anything to do with the supernatural is kind of this mystery box that you’re sucked into, and you feel a little more grown-up, because it might get a little scary, but then you’ll laugh in the middle of that as well.
BALISTRERI: It’s literally, the wish fulfillment of having these superpowers, but also having two best friends and the on again/off again romance thing with Sam that gave it a wonderful soap opera-type feel in the best way. To me, it’s that idea oof fighting ghosts, but also having a secret from your parents and having your best friends together with you. It’s the kind of world you want to just keep going back to.
MARMEL: You just do the best job you can and hope it stands the test of time. I’ve done a few things that haven’t, so I know what that feels like. But this show is really special to me. I think everybody involved in it had a really strong affection for the characters, the world, and then whatever it is they were really great at doing. I knew it was special — I just didn’t realize I’d be talking about it 20 years later.
HARTMAN: Whenever you set out to create a cartoon or show of any kind, you’re just trying to get a job at first. You’re trying to create something that will keep you employed; something that you love and want to work on. But then it goes to the next level where you do want it to last. Everybody wants to create a classic. I grew up watching classics like Bugs Bunny, Charlie Brown, and The Grinch. You want [your show] to become a classic [in the same way, but] it is odd because you are not in control of the classic thing. You just want to make the best show possible and if you make it well enough or it hits a chord strong enough, people will still talk about it without your help. That’s what a classic is.
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