Danny Phantom was written in April 2004 by Butch Hartman. The series stars teenage boy Danny Fenton the son of two ghost hunters, who lives a double life as the ghost superhero Danny Phantom who attempts to apprehend ghosts that have inflitrated the mortal world while protecting his secret identity. Danny Phantom is a combination of two genres that I like which are surprisingly not combined more often; superhero fiction and occult fiction. It is perhaps because the superhero genre is an idealistic humanistic genre at heart, while occult fiction features the meeting of humans with often dark powers far beyond their control. However their fusion can create quite interesting hybrids.
3 Reasons I love it:
1: Danny Phantom as a series I think does a really great job of blending and balancing the technological, representing the human, the realm of the known with the supernatural, representing the inhuman, the realm of the unknown. Danny is both Fenton, of a family of technological ghost hunters who regularly uses his family's ghost-hunting technology, and Phantom, a ghost who uses supernatural abilities and grapples with his own unknown limits. The Human World and the Ghost Zone in Danny Phantom are stated to be two halves of the same coin and this is true both literally and metaphorically. This is the thing that I think binds the superhero and occult genres as both are about the fundamentally human meeting the fundamentally inhuman. An average episode of Danny Phantom plays off both the sense of the known material human realm and the otherwordly ghost world with the best episodes showing how they reflect one another.
2: This might be a bit of a general point but the series is really good at using pathos, and in particular ideas about familial love are where a large number of the best moments of the series happen for me. It's surprising to learn that the Creator Butch Hartman is known for generally more abstracted series that are more gag based as while Danny Phantom does have gags in it, even some very funny ones at that, possibly because of the idealistic expectations of the superhero genre or the more intense nature of occult fiction dealing with human experience stretched to the absolute, Danny Phantom has great moments that come from love including moments like Danny's first defeat of Vlad not via force but through leverage that his parents would always love him, or Danny using his family's gadgets to fight Dark Danny, or my favorite moment of the series.
3: Danny Phantom does a really good job at balancing being for lack of a better term "cartoonish" without sapping things of reverence. Very often things in Danny Phantom take advantage of the medium of being in a cartoon, not in a meta way like something like Animaniacs would do, but moreso in quirky comical exaggeration way. If you know me you know that describing something as "quirky" is one of the quickest surefire ways of making me not like it because it usually means "this is something that's not going to take itself seriously and self-deprecate it's own tropes while still expecting me to take it seriously and like it." Danny Phantom in part due to being a mashup of something as counterculture as occult as well as a being a homage to something as cheesy and over the top as classical comics sort of forms a world that takes itself seriously by not taking itself seriously. To give a minor example, Vlad is presented at first as having a few obsessions; one of which being that he can't buy the Green Bay Packers, an American Football Team. At first this seems to be random however the series then goes to use it as an example of how all Vlad's money, his life obsessing over what he can't, will not get him what he wants. To put it another way, the series does a really good job with things being played for laughs and at the same time having importance.
3 Flaws:
Before I get into this, I'd like to address something that will not be here; that being Season 3. Season 3 is very disliked I found to my surprise. When I first saw S3 I did truthfully notice it was not as good as Season 2 however I think the negativity towards it is overblown and would give a partial defense of it.
1: I'm a fan of the superhero genre but there's superhero tropes that I'm not going to lie, drive me up my wall and they're all here. Danny Phantom is not a nuanced take on the superhero genre, it's an homage and some of the tropes it homages are ones I really am not fond of, like an excessive focus on civilian drama (which admittingly is more an invention of the modern superhero) or the fact that the hero gives his identity secret from people who he has no reason too. One of the most frustrating moments in the series is when Danny erases his parents memories of his identity in Reality Trip after they already accepted him, why Danny? If you get annoyed by cheesy superhero one-liners or characters being irratonally guilted for doing things any person would do because they're supposed to be "better", or the populace hating someone who regularly saving them, this is not gonna surprise you.
2: On a related note, Danny Phantom's world is sometimes really unfair to Danny. Much like a certain wallcrawler, Danny seems to constantly get bad luck and moreover the world treats him completely unfairly. I don't have the disdain for Sam's character a lot of people have but I do find the moral double standards the show has for the two of them to be pretty sad; Sam spying on Danny is treated as morally fine but Danny spying on Sam in a very similar cirumstance is treated as wrong. Despite saving Amity Park, and sometimes the world, a bunch, Danny almost never gets any commendation and even Spider-Man gets some credit now and then before people promptly forget about it but people in Danny Phantom fear Danny Phantom despite no one propogandizing them too like Jameson.
3: The series was cut short and this is especially a thing for DP because it had ongoing continuity which from what I understand was pretty rare for a cartoon of it's time. This means there are some foreshadowing elements and plot threads, including in some of the most beloved episodes of the entire series, that have no resolution. Even beyond that the series feels like it was cut short, with a lot of ideas in the universe of the series feeling like potential that will never be used. When people ask for more of this series, I really get why. It's not just because they really love the series, it's because it's a series that feels unfinished.
Favorite Part:
My favorite part is the climax of "My Brother's Keeper". The ghost villainess Spectre has inflitrated Danny's school pretending to be a guidance council, feeding off the spirit of the kids there to keep herself young, making them fall into a depressed self-critical state. This includes Danny, who has been hard on himself the entire episode, despite the attemped support from his older sister Jazz, the last spirited kid at their school. Spectra reveals her plan to kill Jazz to drain the last bit of happiness and spirit from everyone there and Danny regains his spirit to protect his sister. I really love especially the way he regains it, saying to himself: "Man, I'm so tired of you dumping on me. And I'm so tired of dumping on myself. Jazz never did that, even when I was mad at her...and I won't let her down!"
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