Review: Danny Phantom

Yeah, this has nothing to do with movies, but considering how neglected this platform had been during 2020, I might start adding a few things here and there.

When this series first came out, it was just another Butch Hartman series. He did The Fairy Oddparents and this was in the same animation stuff. 
Except in this case, the stars of the show are teenagers. Fairy Oddparents had its moments for me, but only over the first couple of seasons. Once Poof came into the picture, I lost interest, but we'll always have our inside jokes from the series. Like the episode with the baseball team and Timmy wishes Chester was the best baseball player ever. Or the movie with the remote controls that made fun of a lot of TV series. And of course where Timmy wishes for "a game that is challenging, a game you can't wish yourself out of"...

[I figured I'd include a sketch I did myself instead of doing a Google search-- I did this way back in 2005...]

Within a couple of episodes, I was hooked on Danny Phantom. Basically, Danny Fenton is the son of two ghost hunters and he gets ghost powers when he fixes the portal to the Ghost Zone they created. Many comparisons were drawn to Spider-Man and rightfully so because he's around the same age as Peter Parker and he has a superhero identity. And the school bully's name was Dash, whereas in the first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movie, it was Flash.
In this case, though, he's not completely alone. His two best friends, Tucker and Sam, know his secret and help him fight the michevious ghosts that come out of the portal.

I hadn't revisited it in years, but I did a search on Amazon and found the entire series on DVD. That was one of my 2019 Christmas presents and because it had 52 episodes, doing one a week could be a great way to pass the time.
Little did I know in January how important this routine was gonna be... ANYTHING to look forward to with everything going on. 

Some spoilers ahead... if anyone cares...

The first couple of seasons, I remembered really well, but I did reach a point where every episode was brand new to me. Including the finale where everyone finally finds out about his secret identity. 

As for how to summarize all of this, I'm not entirely sure how to proceed. I don't want to go and review every single episode. But I'll certainly skim through the list to find highlights worthy of mention. 

In the grand scheme, I saw nearly all of the first 2 seasons and season 3 was completely new territory for me. It was kinda amazing that it kept the same tone and sense of humor for that long and it still felt fresh. The one thing I really didn't like about season 3 was that Vlad Masters, Danny's biggest foe and another half-ghost entity, becomes the Mayor of Amity Park and I was terrified that was going to take things to the point of no return where things weren't as fun anymore. Luckily, very little changed about the series going forward. And when it became part of the plot, there were new gags to be had at his expense.

A few other seasons like Psych, I've had this issue where I want the comedic tone to be a constant. When things get too serious or a formula changes, I find it unsettling. That happened in the last season of Psych where Juliet found out Shawn lied about being psychic and she spent over a month being mad at him over it. And it also had a couple of "special" episodes with the psychopaths Yin and Yang where there were very few laughs to be had. Another example of this was The Office where Jim and Pam started having their difficulties in the final season and a bunch of us were freaking out they were going to break up.

Fact is: I'm not good with change. And I'd gotten into the habit in recent years that, if something is upsetting me to the point I'm dreading it, I just cut ties with it completely. "Once Upon a Time" did that in the penultimate season finale and I didn't watch the last season to see how it all ended.

Thankfully, Danny Phantom didn't have any Point of No Return moments where I just didn't enjoy it anymore. And I gotta say it is criminally underrated in that respect. Or maybe it just has that quirky sense of humor that resonates with me. 

Beyond that, the most serious parts of the series were the 2-parters like Reign Storm and The Ultimate Enemy. The latter was my least favorite part of the entire series because it really painted a depressing picture of Danny's future. All of his loved ones get killed in a freak accident and the end result is that his ghost half becomes an unstoppable villain. Yeah, not a feel good moment.

Now for the good stuff... 
Danny Phantom had such a huge cast of ghost characters, each with their own personalities, powers and quirks. A lot were super creative and several make recurring appearances, so it gave something extra to look forward to each week. 

Tucker and Sam also have great personalities. He's a self-promclaimed techno geek and his PDA (yeah, this is REALLY dated...  the series ended just before iPhones were invented) is able to jam or bypass a lot of technologies. Sam is a vegetarian goth and one of the best female characters across all Nicktoons, maybe even cartoons in general. She knows exactly who she is and never backs down from what she thinks is right. There's also a cute build-up of her relationship with Danny where they slowly realize they have feelings for each other. There are hints throughout, but it becomes far more obvious in Season 3.

Valerie has an interesting progression as the series goes on. She becomes a ghost hunter after a series of unfortunate events caused by Danny leading her to hate all ghosts. But she develops a crush on Danny as a human. So that makes for an interesting conflict of interest. Danny knows she's a ghost hunter, but she doesn't know he's part ghost. If one thing could have been added to the series finale, it would be her having some sort of conversation with Danny after she finds out about his secret. 
Plus, Cree Summer was great as Susie in Rugrats, so it was cool for her to have another great character to play. 

Mr. Lancer was another funny side character, although a different kind of funny that he'd probably want to be known for. He's the English teacher and the main authority figure Danny and his friends deal with at school. But he doesn't always get taken so seriously. He also has this running gag where his exclamations are book titles. 
The first one was "Paradise...Lost!"... when he was about to enjoy his lunch of meat (when the school was forced to do a vegetarian menu, thanks to Sam) and it disappeared before he could dig in. 

Even across the entire series, my favorite episode is still Fanning the Flames where the student body is obsessed with rock star Ember and she's a ghost that gets her powers from their cheering. Plus, "Remember" is possibly the catchiest pop song EVER. Even without her being a ghost and having hypnotic powers, it's hard not to get that stuck in your head. 
Mr. Lancer had a bunch of exclamations in this one because he couldn't control the students under Ember's spell. Everything from "Chicken Soup of the Soul!" to "Lord of the Flies! They're slipping through my hands!"

Season 3 had one really fun episode Girls' Night Out where a lot of the ghost characters interacted with each other in unexpected ways. Ember, Kitty and Spectra made all of the guys disappear from Amity Park and it was up to three of the main female characters, Sam and Danny's mom and sister, to take care of them. It was so much fun.

The tone was kinda similar to another one, Identity Crisis, where Danny used one of his dad's inventions to split himself in half. So Tucker and Sam could enjoy hanging out with him while his ghost side did all of the crime fighting. Danny Fenton was a surfer boy kind of chill and when Tucker and Sam had to split up, Tucker always said "I call fun Danny". Meanwhile, Danny Phantom was over-the-top in an Adam West Batman kind of way, so the contrast was hilarious.

One that was fascinating in hindsight was the two-parter Reality Trip where there was a ghost gauntlet Freakshow (a human who has the power to control ghosts to do his bidding- his episode "Control Freak" wasn't quite as fun) wanted to use to control the world. But it needed 3 stones in order to work and Danny, Tucker, and Sam sent them into different places they planned to spend their summer vacation.
Because I had zero knowledge of Marvel comics when this episode premiered, it blew my mind when I realized this was another version of the story with the Infinity Gauntlet and the Infinity Stones. Luckily, in this case, nobody had to die at the end of it. But it was fun finally understanding that reference. 

Another great one in Season 3 involved the Box Ghost-- who is practically the laughingstock of the ghost zone and in reality. His only power is manipulating boxes. In Boxed-Up Fury, he stole Pandora's box and actually became a credible enemy. It was also full of Greek mythology references and I'm sucker for that sort of thing. 

And there were two holidays one. One for Halloween where there's a competition to decorate haunted houses. Mr. Lancer recruited Danny and his friends while the gym leader, Mrs. Tetslaff had Dash.
Another was for Christmas where the narration was completely in rhyme and Danny was the only person who hated Christmas because his parents fight every year about whether Santa Claus is real or not. I'd read some YouTube comments saying how they don't like this episode because Danny gets forced by the story to enjoy Christmas... it was interesting that Sam, who is usually anti-anything that has to do with happiness and cheer, likes Christmas. But the best part was Danny outsmarting the ghost narrator by saying the word "orange" and he couldn't rhyme anymore. At the end of the episode, he's in jail and someone hands him a basket full of oranges ("Get those away from me!")

Three more... I could on all day, but I'm burning daylight...

Memory Blank, which reveals that Sam was the reason Danny got his ghost powers. She wishes she'd never met him after an argument, a wish made real by the ghost genie Desiree, and she needs to set things right by recreating the accident. She adds the logo on Danny's costume so it's easier to tell which episodes were from season one and beyond.

Life Lessons, where everyone is paired off in couples to take care of a sack of flour to learn responsibility. Tucker and Sam are paired up. Tucker tries to rake in some extra cash by running a daycare... which backfires in the most hilarious way. Sam winds up being mom of the year and the only person in class to get an A. Danny gets paired with Valerie because they're both late to class. Their flour sack gets kidnapped by Skulker (the ultimate ghost hunter) and Valerie (in her ghost hunting gear) has to work together with Danny Phantom to retrieve it from the Ghost Zone. 

Teacher of the Year where Danny has to retake an English test with Mr. Lancer because he's failing. Meanwhile, Tucker and Sam are in an online computer game trying to stop Technus (master of all technology!) from gaining control of the Internet. This is another fun one for the video game references and also what Danny learns about Mr. Lancer and from Mr. Lancer with poetry. In one class, we read William Blake's poems, "The Lamb" and "The Tyger" so I could relate to that part of the dialogue. 

I haven't revisited it in a number of years, but I was inspired to write something after seeing much of Danny Phantom. It had some elements of things I went through in high school and my freshman year in college, but also that movie "Just like Heaven" with Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo. So maybe I'll revisit that at some point.