Best Lines: “You Ate Your Own Heini?”

My son is three, my daughter is eight, and I am 41, but we all love “Phineas and Ferb,” an animated show on the Disney Channel, which offers a little something for everybody.

Phineas and Ferb are brothers and the show is set during their seemingly endless summer vacation. For kicks, they think of incredibly elaborate things to do, like building a roller coaster in their back yard. Their older sister, Candace, lives for the day that she will be able to bust Phineas and Ferb to Mom and Dad, but it never quite works out that way.

The boys have a pet platypus named Perry, who doubles as a secret agent charged with foiling the evil Dr. Doofenshmirtz. (One of my favorite moments in every episode comes when these cheery female voices sing the evil doctor’s corporate jingle: “Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated.”)

A few months back, my kids started saying the phrase, “You ate your own heini?” and I had no idea what they were talking about except that it seemed to crack them up to no end. One day recently, we were watching “Phineas and Ferb” and my daughter gushed, “This is the heini episode!”

As it turned out, Dr. Doofenshmirtz zapped Perry with a machine that encased the platypus in a thick coating of chocolate. Doofenshmirtz exults in his triumph and plans to unleash his machine on the entire planet. But Perry emerges to battle him once again. Doofenshmirtz, who speaks with a silly German accent, looks over at the chocolate shell of Perry’s body, where a certain piece of the anatomy has gone missing, allowing him to escape.

“You ate your own heini?” Doofenshmirtz says incredulously and we all laughed long and hard.

It has become a standard phrase of ours whenever we want to express complete shock and surprise at something.

Tags: phineas and ferb; heini