Super Bowl champion Martellus Bennett (New England Patriots tight end) and Emmy-winning Phineas and Ferb co-creator Jeff ‘Swampy’ Marsh have teamed-up for the new animated family series Hey A.J.!, adapted from Bennett’s books. It’s about a sweet girl, her dad, best friend, and bunny companion on adventures that blend imagination and reality. Hey A.J.! premieres Tuesday Jan. 13 on Disney Junior and Wednesday Jan. 14 on Disney+. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: Martellus, you are a Super Bowl champ. Listen, I’m an Eagles fan, but you’ve done a lot in the football world with many teams over the years, including the Patriots. With everything you’ve done, you’ve had a huge impact on the football world. Congrats on your career.

Martellus Bennett: Thank you. I appreciate that. My brother played for the Eagles. [Michael Bennett]

JM: Yeah. That rivalry — is it always still a fun rivalry when you’re watching games and your teams face off or big, Super Bowl matches? Is it always fun to still watch some of the big games?

MB: I actually don’t even watch sports.

JM: Really?

MB: Yeah. I’ve never really been a sports fan. I enjoy playing the sports, but it’s not the first thing I think of. I’m very much into Akira Kurosawa films and movies from the sixties and seventies. So I spend a lot of my time watching movies and animated series when they come out with my daughter. I watch a lot of animation, but I very rarely watch football.

JM: That’s very interesting. That’s like your character on one of the episodes of “Hey A.J.!” that I got to screen: Does he wanna be immersed in the game anymore? Does he wanna watch the game with his family? It’s very interesting. But I’m a movie guy too, so I love that. Swampy, because of “Phineas and Ferb” and the impact of that and the success as we know over these many years, how did you feel wanting to jump in with Martellus on something… going after a younger audience a little bit here with “Hey A.J.!”

Jeff ‘Swampy’ Marsh: I finished another series, which was my first preschool series before that, which was also a book [“Pete + Cat”], and then I was shown Marty’s book, the first “Hey A.J.!” book. And I just thought it was gorgeous and I loved the stories it was telling and how it was celebrating imagination and that father daughter-relationship. But what I really liked was… it was terrifying. It was an area that I was completely uncomfortable with, and I realized I hadn’t been creatively truly uncomfortable for a while. And so in that sense it was thrilling. It was nice to be back at the point where you’re like, “Yeah, I don’t know.” It’s nice to have those butterflies in your stomach again. It’s like when you go out to perform, you get to a certain point where you’re just so comfortable with it, you’re fine with it. And this was like, “Oh my gosh, I’m playing in a whole new sandbox with all new toys and oh my, what if I get it wrong?” At this stage of my career, it was really exciting — and liberating as well, in an odd way.

JM: You guys got it so right. Martellus, you get to voice basically yourself — dad Marty. Daughter A.J. is so sweet and so special. You based it on your books. You say you’re an animation fan. What was it about bringing these books to the screen and a love of Disney animation and seeing everything go from the page to the screen — and kind of your dreams coming true with this?

MB: In the process I was never afraid to knock on doors. I was out there knocking on doors. “I got this idea, I got this idea, I got this idea.” It is “Oh, this is great, but no. Oh, this is great, but no. Oh, this is great but no.” You can reach the pinnacle in one space, but then you have to humble yourself and remove the ego to start back at the bottom again and try to get to what that Super Bowl would be. And Disney was my first “Yes”. You get drafted by a team like Disney, you’re like, “Oh, this is great, this is how it works. This is what’s going on.” The process was a long journey from when I first wrote the book until now, when the show’s coming out. My daughter’s 11, so it’s been about an 11-year process. But the best thing about it is that for 11 years, my daughter has seen me work towards something. Because she wasn’t old enough to watch me in football, really. I retired when she was like four or five. So for her entire life, she knows her dad as a creator. She doesn’t really know me as a football player. Having a creative child and for her to be able to witness the perseverance and the ambition that it takes to draw something and watch it become something has been such a valuable lesson, not only for me, but my family.

Animation’s not easy. Working with other people’s not easy. Dreaming together out loud with others. It takes a whole lot of effort to be able to do that. But when you find the right people and you find the right home that allows you to dream out loud and dream honestly, and dream as colorful as possible, and those other people are also dreaming just as colorful as you, then you are able to paint pictures that can move… generations for extended periods of time. Not just my daughter, but the next… My friends are having kids now, and I’m like, “Yo, your kids are gonna grow up on a Martellus Bennett show. How that feel?” (laughs) It’s been a dream come true and for a dream like this as a kid, for it to come true at the pinnacle of animation with the Walt Disney Company, the company you studied, the company that was a pivotal part of your childhood, and now you get to contribute to the childhoods of the future with that said company, I think it’s really cool.

JM: I love the fact that this show is a blend of imagination and reality. Martellus, how important was that for you with that blend? We see it with A.J., her dad, [friend] Jessie, Theo the bunny, who’s hilarious. That blend as they dream of everything, go to all these places and go on all these adventures.

MB: So that’s really the foundation of everything I do creatively. I write a lot about fantastical blackness, but blur the lines of imaginary and the reality where everything is constantly colliding what’s real and what’s not. And that’s what the power of imagination gives us the ability to do. And with A.J., we really wanted to be able to show mundane situations turn into fantastical ones, to enhance the power of her imagination. So we had to ground it in reality to make the imagination more powerful as a theme throughout the show, because it’s like, “Yeah, this is real. But in her mind, this is what it looks like. This is her world that she’s playing in, and the entire house is her playground.” And when you unlock and engage your imagination, the entire world becomes your playground. So that’s the heart of it all, blurring the lines of imagination and reality. So I think that we nailed that in so many ways.

JM: Yeah, you do a fantastic job with all that. And Swampy, one of the other great things of this show — the songs. Obviously, you’re so familiar with that with “Phineas and Ferb”. I love “Chocolate Lava” in episode one. They’re gonna be catchy as families are watching these episodes over and over again. What did you enjoy the most about the songs for this series?

JSM: I’m just glad that other people are gonna have the opportunity to have those earworms stuck in their head the rest of the day, ’cause we were writing them and mixing them and recording them — and you’d be somewhere out in the public and you’re doing “Chocolate Lava”. It’s been in my head for three days. We’re not trying to make preschool songs or Disney Jr. songs. We just wanted to make good songs, really great songs that didn’t exclude kids. So it really opened up a whole new world to us. What I really liked is there were new genres of music that I got to play in that I don’t normally do. It’s not that we’ve ever shied away from any particular type of music, but I was working with all new musical people. Getting to work with Bootsy Collins and Jhene Aiko and Meghan Trainor to do some of these songs. And working with people who’ve never sung before. David Mitchell, who plays Theo, doesn’t sing. He’s so British and we got him to sing a punk song — and we just had a blast doing it. This is another opportunity for me to work with my partner at Surfing Giant Studios, Michael Hodges, whose musical background is staggering. When he goes out and finds talent to come work with you on this, you’re working with folks that are just off the charts good and cool.

JM: Martellus, how did it feel voicing Marty — getting into the vocal booth? Was there a mentality in the booth vs. on the field as far as delivering dialogue and lines here?

MB: I had one of the greatest voice talent people, with Swampy directing. There’s this whole thing of Marty on page vs. Marty behind the mic. On the page it could say one thing, but… we call it Marty-fying it. “This is what we need you to do, but just Marty-fy it.” ‘Cause I have a very particular way of talking and sounding. And I wanted the dad to be big and have as much bravado and like the star player on the field, but also a star player in the household. Commanding, but also playful.

JSM: When you go into this — and anybody who’s in my position is a voice director — and you say you’re gonna be working with an athlete… you take a big deep breath ’cause you really don’t know what you’re gonna get. And these are not people who’ve been encouraged to be uncomfortable, looking foolish, being silly… and that’s really what voiceover work is. Things that Marty does incredibly well is learn, observe, and take stuff on board. He comes with a very strong voice. But he wants to learn what you do. He doesn’t pretend he knows everything. He knows what he knows. He’s really confident in that. But he’s, “Show me. Teach me. I’m open. I wanna learn.” And nobody plays as freely and as hard as Marty does.

MB: Thank you. I would say to piggyback on that… I think that as an athlete the number one thing that makes a good… every great athlete wants to be coached. But they have to trust the coach. When I was in the booth, I was being a player again, and Swampy was the head coach, and it was just like, “All right, I gotta do these things, but I still want to play the way that I love to play, but I want to get the job done that the coach wants me to get done.” So I took that mindset into the booth and it allowed me to get better very quickly.

JM: ABC and ESPN have the Super Bowl in February 2027. Do you wanna see A.J. and Marty be a part of the telecast and the lead up to it in some way? I think that’d be awesome.

JSM: If it’s not, I’ll be a little angry.

MB: Me too. It makes so much sense for everybody to do it. Let’s do it! Who you gonna pitch, Jackson? You got somebody you can pitch it for us?

JM: Listen, let’s talk to Bob Iger. Let’s go right to Bob and let’s do this ’cause you deserve to be a part of the telecast with these characters and this show, which is gonna have such a great impact for families.

MB: We just gotta get Bob and Roger Goodell together. I’m pretty sure they know each other. I think that’d be cool: A.J. / Super Bowl. It’ll be huge because… Look, I was lucky enough to — well not lucky I earned it — but I played in the Super Bowl and won the Super Bowl. And now as an animator / creator, I’m in another Super Bowl… of animation. You wanna play for the Patriots, you wanna win games, you wanna win Super Bowls. If you wanna do those things, then Disney’s the place to do it. Now I’ve been able to achieve two Super Bowls in my life. I’m a two-time Super Bowl champion: creatively and physically, with my body. So I think it’s really cool.