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Framing Doofenshmirtz

It has become a trend in recent years to come to terms with things not appearing as though they once seemed. Through childhood we were fed stories through the likes of consumerism that presented a plain take on the characterization of certain fictional characters. Specifically, what made a protagonist righteous and what made the antagonist so vile. The media fed off the simple minds of children and in our innocent, developing minds beginning to decipher the aspects of the other separate from ourselves we all conformed in agreement that doing something wrong makes you the bad guy and fighting the bad guy makes you the good guy. 

In my youth I will admit that I fell victim to this. There were plenty of television shows and movies that I watched that were feats for my generation (generation Z) a majority of those being disney related. The feature films where I saw villains taking voices, keeping princesses in captivity, attempting murder with poisonous apples. However, one there was one Disney Channel cartoon in particular that made me question the notion- what made a villain truly villainous? The show Phineas and Ferb centered around two boys trying to live their summer to the fullest, the show consisted of an A and B storyline every episode. Storyline A would show the boys and their friends concocting plans to build their fun for the day while storyline B let the audience peer into the double life of the boys’ pet platypus Perry, who would travel to the laboratory of his arch nemesis Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz and foil his plans to take over the “Tri State Area” using one of his evil inventions (that humorously always end in “inator”) 

Throughout the show we as the audience were presented with the B storyline to showcase the virtue of Perry and his organization’s intentions in keeping the world safe, but at the expense of Doofenshmirtz and his plans always being foiled. Perry’s agency named O.W.C.A (Organization Without a Cool Acronym) is an intelligence agency run by a man named Major Monogram who recruits animal agents to keep the Tri-State Area safe from crimes of evil scientist masterminds. The threat being so grave that these animals are to assume secret identities with their host families in order to spare their livelihoods.

Dr. Doof while making a spectacle of himself and his inventions, I believe never had the intent of really hurting anybody in the way Perry’s organization thought him to be. We learn in increments his torturous backstory. He as a boy was born and brought up for most of his life in the town of Gimmelshtump, Drusselstein to parents who didn’t show up to his own birth. His family consisted of a mother who always wanted a daughter but bore two sons, a father that never saw him as man enough and a younger brother that outshone him in the eyes of everyone around him. 

Essentially the typical nuclear family that despised him enough to cast him aside in the woods as a young child and leave him raised by a family of ocelots. No explanation given, but from the likes of it his family must have been desperate and under a lower socioeconomic status than they presented themselves or they simply didn’t care for him. Fast forwarding, as an adult he faced the trials and tribulations of marriage that left him with nothing but a broken heart and a daughter, fresh from divorce he worked to cohabitate with his ex wife and make sure his daughter’s life is better than his was. He took parenting to great lengths yet as she grew he became estranged and distant in attempts to join the in-group amongst her peers. 

In obvious human nature his past piles up to make him the person that he became. In this case it is a matter of deciphering which direction it led him. While he does make evil inventions, that doesn’t necessarily define him as socially deviant. The degree of his crimes are not with the intent to end lives or cause harm upon others deliberately, he only has one true goal and it is brewed within the parameters of conflict theory. He wants to take down his younger brother who he believes has stratified himself as higher than his brother all his life. His brother who has been elected mayor who has never taken his job as seriously as he should but gets by on the fact that he is handsome. Pretty privilege has run his life and in the midst, left Doofenshmirtz at a disadvantage in the equality of the outcome. There was always something fundamentally keeping Doofenshmirtz from the chance of equal opportunity. 

While I will agree that his methods of achieving equality or at least a semblance of what he was denied all his life is a bit unethical, his intentions are built on self preservation and not out of malice. That should not mark him as a super villain, it should elicit that someone listen to what he has to say and air his grievances out in a healthier way. His whole life has been trading one form of abuse to another. Whether that be being outcast by his own kinship, or falling victim to his brother’s exertion of hegemonic masculinity to get into higher politics he doesn’t deserve the further abuse that O.W.C.A inflicted on him. They invade his privacy by spying on him and instead of taking the necessary measures to ensure the “violence” they have deemed him constantly guilty of stops, they barge into his own home (warrantless) , beat him and damage his intellectual property that also simultaneously ends up almost harming the lives of the children in the A storyline. 

Rather than villainize Doofenshmirtz, we should see him as a victim of circumstance. He needs outlets that O.W.C.A should provide instead of taking such violent measures to stop him since it clearly doesn’t work. How many times do they do the same process of Perry being called and sent to Doof’s home to find him in a predicament with one of his inventions, tricks him and ends up beating him up and destroying his invention. It’s the same song and dance, and they as an agency should see that the repeated approach is clearly not solving their problems. Doof is troubled and needs help, since his inventions are always backfiring it’s also clear he’s never going to actually succeed with his plans anyway.