Phineas and Ferb’s Dan Povenmire is unveiling a new Disney animated series creation. Superhero family comedy Hamster & Gretel premieres this Friday August 12th at 9:30pm on Disney Channel. Another new episode airs Saturday morning at 9:30. Povenmire discusses how his own family influenced the look, feel and casting of the characters — and reflects on 15 years since the debut of P&F. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: Did you have this concept in your mind when we last spoke two years ago for the Phineas and Ferb movie?

Dan Povenmire: Probably. I had already done the cold open for the Pilot at that time. I was on vacation with my family and I had this 3×5 card where I had drawn this hamster superhero on there. While on vacation, I went ahead and storyboarded the opening of the Pilot all the way through the reveal that Hamster & Gretel get the powers. I had brought it home and was putting it together in an animatic and I was just doing all the voices so I could time it all out. I had my daughter Meli come in.

Dan Povenmire: I said, “Meli, can you come in here and just read some lines for me?” She said, “Yeah, sure.” And she read them and the voice really clicked. Suddenly I felt like, “Oh, that’s exactly how she sounds in my brain.” I think I was sort of partially basing it on Meli. (laughs) And then we just kept her in through the Pilot. It tested really, really well and her character tested through the roof. We were like, “I’m not sure this is broken. I don’t know if we need to fix it.” She ended-up being the voice of Gretel.

JM: That’s got to be an amazing feeling to see your daughter be a part of this series… as one of the main characters. What amazes you about what she can do with this role of Gretel?

DP: She wasn’t like, “I wanna be an actress!” It wasn’t like that. She really has that sort of ease. We would do TikToks together, and I would use her sometimes. She would write them and I would put them together. She was always so funny and so natural, and she has my sense of humor, almost exactly. If I write something, she says it the way I would want her to say it. She just gets it, even if she doesn’t get… like we did a TikTok one time where I wrote a line for her that was, “No existential nihilism in the house! What have I always told you?” And I asked her later, “Do you know what nihilism is?” And she goes, “No, but I get the shape of that joke. It’s obviously a big word for something that I was just doing.” (laughs)

She always gets the shape of the joke so she knows the right read to give it. And she has a lot of life to her voice. She doesn’t sound like any other girl I’ve heard playing a little girl in a TV show. She has a low, husky voice for a little kid. It sounded unique, and we all fell in love with it.

JM: And you gave yourself a key role as well — the voice of the alien spaceship that gives them these powers!

DP: I did. (laughs) We actually cast somebody else for that. That was the only one that came back and I was like, “I don’t know I like my voice better when I was doing the temp.” “And they were like, “Why don’t you do it?” And I was like, “Alright, I’ll do that one.” I had originally done all the male voices. And there’s even a character in there that’s drawn to look like me: the dad!

JM: Yes he is!

DP: The dad looks like me and the mom looks like my wife. I was like, “But that would be weird if it was my voice coming out of a character that looks like.” So we got Matt Jones to do that. He’s got this great, gravelly voice. That’s funnier than me. It was a fun casting process. Every once in a while, the aliens make a re-appearance, so it’s me. And now there’s two of them. It’s me as one and my story editor, Joanna Hausmann (who’s also a voice actress) doing the other one. So the two people in charge of the show are also in charge of the super powers.

JM: (laughs) In charge of everything that goes on within the universe that you’ve created.

DP: Exactly.

JM: Was there any debate over whether Hamster should talk?

DP: That was actually a suggestion from the previous head of the channel, Gary Marsh. He suggested, “What if you have Hamster talk? You haven’t had any animals talk?” And I said, “Well, we could because…” to me, in my universe, animals don’t talk. They might be secret agents, but they don’t talk.

JM: (laughs)

DP: When he said that, I was like, “Oh we could do that because that could be one of the powers he got from the aliens.” Hamster is a hamster of few words, but they’re always funny because it’s Beck Bennett from Saturday Night Live doing the voice. His audition was… what Hamster sounds like to me. That’s what you’re looking for when you’re casting. “Does this sound like this character sounds in my head?” He nailed it.

JM: Nice. Sibling relationships were so key on Phineas and Ferb. What do you want to bring and show with the relationship between Kevin and Gretel on Hamster & Gretel?

DP: The Kevin and Gretel relationship is sort of based on me and my youngest sister. I have a sister that’s 10 years younger than me. When you get up to six or seven years plus in between siblings, it’s a very different relationship than it is… If you have a sibling that’s 5 and 7, they’re gonna be more competitive with each other. They’re competing for the same things in life at the same time. But when you get that much of a space, it’s more of being a protective older brother.

I was sort of another parent. I was like a third parent to my little sister. I was always trying to help her grow up right and protect her. Not that we wouldn’t ever yell at each other, because we would, but just not as much. Mostly it was this really fun relationship of her having this big play-thing she could play with because I was still young enough to play with her. But I could also drive her to the mall and her friends to the movies. I wanted to see what that relationship was like. I hadn’t really seen that in cartoons at all. The closest thing I had seen to it was the Nickelodeon show… iCarly has a much older brother who was sort of like a father figure.

JM: I love Professor X…clamation! I’m sure you’ve had a ball coming up with all these villain names and what they do.

DP: We’re having a lot of fun. We’re coming up with this whole rogue’s gallery of villains. We’re having a great time.

JM: That’s great. And episode two this poignant scene with Kevin and his mother where they go to this park — this place they had been to when they were younger that’s now closed. That scene legitimately moved me. You had a lot of that in Phineas and Ferb. How did you want to bring the emotional moments like that to your new show?

DP: It’s one of my favorite things about this show: there are so often moments at the end of it that make me go, “Ohhhh!” I get it back in color and I’m like, “I forgot that was coming!” And it really hits me. It’s really because the show, even though it’s a superhero show, is really more focused on the relationship between the family members. That’s the most relatable thing about it. It’s fun to see all the superhero action and it’s fun to see all the comedy. But when you get something that feels like, “This is a very relatable, real moment between two human beings, especially if they’re family and they have that kind of bond” — that’s the goal you can get in storytelling.

JM: Take me back for a moment, if you will, to 15 years ago this month when you had High School Musical 2 premiering on Disney Channel…

DP: Was that 15 years ago this month?!

JM: Yep!

DP: Wow!

JM: Right afterwards was the Rollercoaster episode of Phineas and Ferb. 10.8 million people stuck around to watch the beginning of the new phenomenon known as Phineas and Ferb. Do you remember when Disney told you about the ratings and the impact of that night?

DP: I’m not sure that I even knew what that number was. That was a HUGE number. But I don’t know that I was expecting a specific number. People tell me the ratings are good or the ratings are bad… I don’t know what that actually means in actual people. So I’m not sure I really took it to heart at the time. I now see, “That was a huge number for a premiere for a show.”

We’ve been working on Hamster & Gretel for two years and we’ve been entertaining each other. WE think it’s funny. We’re making each other laugh. We’re having a great time making it. But Friday will be this moment like it was for there where suddenly it’s out there in the world and everybody else can enjoy it. That’s the exciting thing. When it really comes down to it, I’m making this comedy — this show — for the world to experience if they want to. It’s good to put it out there so they can actually experience it.

JM: What is the most SUPER part of this entire experience, if you had to pinpoint it down to one thing, story, factor about making Hamster & Gretel?

DP: To me, the best part of doing any of these cartoons is: At the end of the day, when I’m done with an episode of TV, I can’t really tell if it’s funny anymore. I can only just say, “Well that joke made me laugh the first 15 times I heard it. I’ve now heard it 100 times. It’s not surprising me anymore.” But at the end of a mix or the end of a playback, I always go back to, “I still love these characters. I like these characters so much just as people that don’t really exist but sort of exist for real in my brain.” To me that’s the best thing about making any of these shows — creating characters that I hope everybody else will fall in love with the way I’ve fallen in love with them.