Grey Dress

 

Dan Povenmire studied art at the University of South Alabama and the University of Southern California, but never completed the graduation requirements. He had a short-lived career as a street artist before working on animated TV programs like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Simpsons. In 1993, Dan and coworker Jeffrey Marsh cooked up a series about two inventive stepbrothers, a bumbling supervillain, and his nemesis, a platypus secret agent. Disney picked up Phineas and Ferb, and Dan’s been fielding questions ever since: “Why’s Perry teal? Platypuses don’t really look like that!” Of course, Perry’s a cartoon character, and muddy brown just doesn’t play well in animation. But in 2020, scientists discovered platypuses are bioluminescent. When you expose them to ultraviolet light, they glow blue-green. Dan has no background in biology. Honestly, he barely studied art. But almost two decades earlier, he’d randomly chosen that very color, simply because he thought it looked “cool.”