Hamster & Gretel Creator Dan Povenmire on Working With Disney, Talking Hamsters, and Making Music

On the Elevator Pitch for Hamster & Gretel

ComicBook.com: What's the elevator pitch for Hamster & Gretel? How did this come about?

Dan Povenmire: So the elevator pitch is that it's really about a brother and sister, Kevin and Gretel. So the brother's much older, and he's able to drive, and he thinks he's going to have all this freedom when he gets his driver's license. And he gets his driver's license, and of course, he just becomes the chauffeur to his younger sister, drives her to soccer practice and stuff.

But on one of those trips, they get stopped by aliens who tell them, "The two of you have been selected to receive superpowers!" And he gets really excited about it and they shoot him with this ray. And the ray goes on them, and the superpowers land on Gretel, but also on her hamster who happens to be in the car, which is, as you can imagine, a tragedy for Kevin. So he's trying to figure out where he belongs in this, is he even part of this team? He has to deal with the fact that he feels passed over, but also, he's always trying to protect his sister, because he's the older brother. And does she really need protection now, because she can lift a bus over her head? And so he sort of becomes the guy in the chair on the headphones, and that's our jumping-off point for it.

So it just came about because I had done a drawing of a hamster superhero. I'm constantly doodling when we're writing anything. And when we were writing the Phineas and Ferb movie we did for Disney+ in 2020, I had this whole stack of post-its that I had done different drawings on. And one of them was this superhero hamster flying over a city and looking sort of bored, and I loved him so much that I was like... I went in one night when I was tucking my daughter in, and I pitched her this idea of this show with a superhero hamster, and she was just laughing so much. And I was like, "Maybe this is something," and everything else grew from that one little drawing on a... It was on a pink 3-by-5 card, I think.

On Working With His Daughter

You mentioned your daughter. Hamster & Gretel also has you working with your daughter as the voice of Gretel. What's that like? Is it weird to have that sort of dynamic of family, but also, "I'm kind of your boss?"

We've had to sort of figure out, because sometimes she just doesn't feel like recording at the time. And we record from here. Like, she sits in this chair here, and records into this microphone. And so if she's not really feeling like it, I'll go, "Well, when do you want to do it? We just have to do it sometime this weekend." And she's like, "Okay, how about like after dinner?" Or something like that. But sometimes, if she's busy doing something else, and I was like, "Well, you couldn't do it earlier," and I have to sort of put my foot down and say, "No, we have to do it now, or it won't get done in time for this."

But we're actually usually ahead, because she's so available to me. Some of our other voice actors are so busy as up-and-coming actors, they're constantly working, so we're always having to fight for like, "When can we get them to a studio? They're shooting in Bulgaria." Or, "They're shooting in Atlanta. How do we get them to a studio so we can record them?" We don't have that problem with Meli.

But also, she just grew up with my sense of humor, because she grew up in the house with me. And we were making TikToks together, and we were doing lots of skits and stuff. She wrote some TikToks that I was like, "Okay, I'm going to produce this for you." So that when I write a funny line, I sort of think of it in her voice, and she also knows how I want that said. I don't have to really work on it to get the right line reading out of it.

On Being the Sole Creator

Speaking of creative newness here, after 15-plus years of working together on shows like Phineas and Ferb and Milo Murphy's Law, no Jeff "Swampy" Marsh on Hamster & Gretel. Is that accurate?

Well, it's not entirely accurate. He's doing a voice for us. But he's opened his own studio in Venice, which is walking distance from his house, and walking distance from the beach. And I just, I can't begrudge him that, but he's doing his own projects there, so I'm doing my own projects here. But we talk all the time. And like I say, there's these two old guys that are recurring characters that are sort of like a background gag, that are always playing chess, and it's me and Swampy. So that makes me happy.

I have to imagine that not having Swampy as a co-creator, it's kind of strange, but also maybe creatively freeing in some ways, like you're the one where everything stops with now at this point, right?

Yeah. Well, I mean, I was sort of the final guy, because I was in the editing room so it was always like, I was always that final decision anyway. But I just had to find other people, because Swampy and I, our brains really lock in together humor-wise, and I'll say something, and he'll make it funnier, then I'll make it funnier, and then he'll make it funnier again. I've just had to find other people to do that with. You need to find comedic voices that you trust. So Joanna Hausmann's sort of become that for me, as I just sort of bounce it off of her. My editor is another person, and I bounce it off of her.

On Continuing to Make Music

I have seen the first couple of episodes. Immediately, in the first couple of episodes, there's music. Is it just second nature at this point to include songs in your shows? Do you see yourself ever not doing music in a show at this point?

I don't know why I would stop. To me, writing songs for shows is the most fun, and it's the closest thing you get to immortality, because I still remember, [singing] "Sugar. Ah, honey honey!" Everybody can sing that song. Nobody can tell you a plot line from a specific Archies episode. But you still remember. There's songs I remember from a show called the Groovie Goolies that I don't even know what it looks like anymore. There's the "Eep, Opp, Ork, Ah-ah" from, it was either The Flintstones or Jetsons, I think it was The Jetsons. [Ed. note: It was, in fact, The Jetsons.] Like, I remember those songs, but I don't remember the other stuff. So to me, that's the thing that gets stuck in people's brains the most.

And when I go on Twitter or TikTok, if I search TikTok for the name of any song that I wrote in Phineas and Ferb, if I go "Busted" into TikTok, there's literally millions of videos of people lip-syncing to that song, or doing the costume changes, or recreating it frame for frame. To me, that's the most fun that you have making a show, is getting into people's psyches that way.

On Working With Disney Again and Again

I don't know if you're aware of this, but based on my research and just general knowledge, with Disney Television Animation, it is pretty rare for a creator to come back for multiple series. Hamster & Gretel being your third, fourth if you count Take Two, something like that puts you in rarefied company. We're talking like Tad Stones, Greg Weisman, and maybe that's it, especially for original shows.

There's Craig Gerber on Disney Junior. So yeah, we should form a three-timers club. That's what we should do.

What would your guidance be to anyone who's growing up watching these shows, very excited to have these kinds of shows, and wants to make these? What is the secret to getting Disney to give the thumbs up to these things?

There's two things. I think you should just... Swampy and I pitched Phineas and Ferb around town for 13 years before somebody... It got optioned twice. It got way up the echelon at Nickelodeon one time, and Fox Kids another time, and it just never got made. And then Disney was the first one to say, "Okay, let's do a pilot."

So if there's a show that you think you would want to watch, that's rattling around in your head, and every time you look at it, you go, "That's still the show I want to watch," just keep at it, and keep pushing, and keep pitching it. Because eventually, the people who are the head of the studio will change, and they'll have other sensibilities. You sort of work your way through the studios, and then you start back the next year on the next ones.

On Working With Disney Again and Again (Cont.)

There's that. The other thing is like, the way I've sold all three of these shows is, I went ahead and made an animatic. I made like a storyboard animatic with my voice being all the voices for Phineas. And then when we did Hamster & Gretel, I had my daughter do the Gretel voice, which it's how she ended up doing the Gretel voice. Because I said, "Hey, Meli, can you come in here and just read some lines for me?" And she did, and I was like, "Oh, she's really good." And then she just sort of survived through all the re-castings.

But I showed them something that was already sort of far along in the process. They wouldn't usually see an animatic to something. They would just see a script and some drawings of the characters. And I think, once you give them that and they get the feel for the timing of the comedy, and they get the feel for the kind of filmmaking that you're going to do, and suddenly, they can just watch it and feel like, "Oh, I understand exactly what this show is going to be." Because reading a script, you can't always tell exactly what a show is going to be. It's like, this could be really great or really horrible, depending on how it's executed. This way gives them the idea of exactly how it's going to be executed, and I think that makes it easier for them to say yes.

Right. If you leave as little to the imagination as possible–

Yes.

–how could they possibly say no, right?

Exactly.

On Talking Hamsters

Now, getting more granular specific about Hamster & Gretel, I have to ask because it did surprise me, the hamster talks. Is that one of its powers, or did it always talk?

He did not talk before he was shot with that thing. And we've toyed with doing an episode where he gets, like they get hit with something that takes away their powers, and he just becomes a regular, sort of non-sentient, hamster again. And how sort of tragically sad that would be. I think I brought up Flowers for Algernon, and the writers were like, "No, we can't make it that sad."

On Heading Into the Premiere

The show is about to premiere very, very soon.

Yes.

How are you feeling? Obviously, not your first rodeo at this point, but heading up to the premiere, how do you feel?

Oh, it's always, to me, that's always a great moment because we've been sort of making the show for ourselves for two years. And I'm just sort of really itching to see how people react to it and stuff. I get giddy every time they release a new trailer for it. It's like they release the opening credit sequence, and just seeing people's reactions online. I can't wait for people to see it. I think it's as good a show as Phineas and Ferb. I think it's got that kind of humor, but it also has even more heart, and more variety of storytelling. Phineas and Ferb was sort of a scaffolding, sort of a repeating storyline structure, and we would just hang gags on it. This has a lot more going on with it, so hopefully people will really respond.

Final Thoughts

Is there anything else you would like to say about Hamster & Gretel, about your work for Disney, anything at all?

I just really hope that this finds an audience. I know that TV is much more segmented than it used to be, so it's harder to find a big audience because people have so many different choices of stuff to watch. I just hope that they tune in and give this show a chance, because I think they'll fall in love with it. To me, by the time I'm done with an episode of any TV, it's very hard for me to tell what's really funny anymore. All I can say is, "Well, that joke used to make me laugh before I saw it 200 times in the editing process. So I think it's still funny," but, you know.

But the thing that I can really tell at the end, like when we do a final mix of an episode and do a playback, is I always sort of latch onto, "Do I still love these characters?" And I really love these characters. These characters are in my brain the same way that Phineas and Ferb was in my brain.