Being the co-creator of the critically acclaimed, incredibly popular Phineas and Ferb helped Dan Povenmire when it came to casting Hamster & Gretel. Disney Channel’s new music-filled animated series set to premiere on August 12, 2022 features actors and songwriters who’ve grown up with Phineas and Ferb or have kids who watched the series. But for the lead character of Gretel, all Dan had to do was turn to his daughter, Meli, who turned out to be perfect for the role.
The father-and-daughter team paired up for interviews at the 2022 San Diego Comic-Con where Disney Channel hosted the first-ever panel for Hansel & Gretel. Here’s what they had to say about the plot, superpowers, and whether we will ever see a Phineas and Ferb crossover episode.
You started out as a scratch temporary voice and your dad put you through the paces a little bit to get the role. What was it like when you finally got it?
Meli Povenmire: “I knew it was going to happen, honestly.”
Dan Povenmire: “Did you? You didn’t tell me you knew.”
Meli Povenmire: “You didn’t tell me a single time that like, ‘Oh, you might not get it.’ He was like, ‘I think you’re going to get it because I feel like you’re one of the best. You just tested really well.’
I was always pretty confident in my skills. (Laughing) I sound so full of myself. But I’ve done temp lines before – I’ve done auditions – but this was like the first time where it was just like a transition from doing the temps straight into doing the actual voice, and it was so exciting. It didn’t really hit me until a few months into recording that I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m actually this person. I actually have this job.’ But it was super exciting.”
Can you take us through the origin of the story?
Dan Povenmire: “Well, the origin is like everything – it’s sort of from a drawing I did of a super hamster. And then I love this guy, but I don’t know what to do with it. And then I sort of started basing it on my relationship with my youngest sister. There’s three of us – there was me and my younger sister and then 10 years and another sister. And by the time I was 16, I had this six-year-old sister who I became her chauffeur and was taking her around and stuff. Then it was like, ‘What can I do? What if we make that part of the dynamic?’
It became, okay, what if the little sister gets superpowers too? What if from the older brother’s point of view, he was supposed to get the superpowers because they were given to them by an alien who comes and says, ‘We will bestow upon you powers unimaginable,’ and then shoots him with this beam but she happened to have her pet hamster in the car and the powers go to her and her pet hamster. What would that do to their dynamic?
You know, the older brother is always protective of the little sister and now she can lift a bus over her head. What kind of protection does she need? So, that became sort of the basis of the whole show is that sort of dynamic. Like, ‘Oh, your little sister can now kick your butt and everybody else’s.’ Where do you find your place in that – and her pet? So that was sort of the jumping-off point.”
Superhero origin stories always involve the superhero finding their powers, learning them, and then making mistakes along the way. How much of that are we going to see this season?
Dan Povenmire: “Well, we do because Gretel is all kid. She’s all impulse and doesn’t think things through. […] She just wants to do the easiest, fastest thing that a kid would want to do and he’s trying to get her to be responsible.
But she doesn’t really end up learning much because she does things her way. It always eventually works out so that’s a little bit of a frustration for him. He’s trying to tell her the responsible way to do things and then she does it the wrong way and it usually works out. Sometimes he has to come in and help and solve problems for her, but it always ends up okay. So, she sort of comes out the same person all the time, which is fun.”
Can you talk about some of the evil villains we’ll see and some of the crazy superpowers?
Dan Povenmire: “Who’s your favorite?”
Meli Povenmire: “My favorite – there’s a cat-themed villain. What’s his name?”
Dan Povenmire: “Copycat.”
Meli Povenmire: “Copycat. And he has this gun that shoots hairballs but how he reloads it… I was watching a video of it when I was doing the ADR and he’s shooting but then it starts making this cat coughing sound. He was like, ‘Oh, it’s empty,’ and he opens it, pulls out a naked cat, puts it to the side, and puts in this hairy cat and starts shooting it again. That’s probably my favorite.”
Dan Povenmire: “I like all of them. We have a guy whose name is Big Baby and he’s just an infant and it turns out he was a politician who kept losing to younger, taller candidates so he decided to make himself young and tall. He made himself too young and too tall, and now he’s running amuck in the city. He’s like a 40 foot…imagine if King Kong was infant human in an enormous diaper.”
You’ve confirmed this is set in the same universe as Phineas and Ferb and Milo Murphy’s Law. What are your ultimate plans for crossovers?
Dan Povenmire: “Well, we don’t have concrete plans to do that other than we drop hints that they are in the same place. We don’t have that story figured out because we have a big sweeping story that goes through the second season – knock on wood. But we always sort of have that in the back of our minds, like, how are we going to put these guys together at some point? I think it would be really fun and I always love revisiting those worlds.
I would love to do one where Phineas and Ferb and Milo and the Hamster and Gretel crew are all together in some crazy adventure.”
Music has always been important to you in all your shows. What are some of the highlights musically in Hamster & Gretel?
Dan Povenmire: “They are releasing an album the same day as the first episode, so we had to go through and find songs that didn’t give away plot points and still sort worked on their own as songs. And we put it together and I just listened to it a couple of days ago all the way through and I was like, ‘Oh, I think I like these songs better than the Phineas songs.’ And I think we set the bar pretty high then.
I think it’s a function of a couple of things. I think I’ve gotten a little bit better as a songwriter but also, I started – because I didn’t have Swampy and I didn’t have Martin, who are like my constant collaborators on songs – reaching out to people that I knew from college or people that I’ve found on TikTok, like songwriters.”
Meli Povenmire: “That’s right – Sophia James.”
Dan Povenmire: “Sophia James has come in and written a couple of songs with me. She’s spectacular.”
Meli Povenmire: “She helped with my favorite song.”
Dan Povenmire: “There’s a song called ‘Strawberry Festival’ that’s about the strawberry festival that the boys in the family think it’s going to be this sweet little environment, but it’s actually this high-octane thing.”
Meli Povenmire: “About some stuntman whose last name is Strawberry.”
Dan Povenmire: “I found a bunch of people on TikTok that are great songwriters. And if I hear them do it over and over again, I know they’ve got the goods. It’s not a shock in the dark. I’ll reach out to them if we are mutuals and say, “Hey, would you want to write a song for a Disney show?’ They are usually like, ‘Yes, let’s do that.’
So, I did some of those on Zoom, and now that the pandemic’s sort of coming to a close, I’ve had some of them over to the house. Although I don’t know if Michael (Cimino) told you but when Michael came over to write that song, I had COVID and I didn’t know that at all. The next day I woke up really sick and I was like, ‘Oh no! I’m going to have to call Michael.’ I called him and he’s like, ‘Okay, I’ll check. I’ll make sure,’ and he did not get it. We were in the same little room writing a song for an hour and a half and he somehow did not get COVID from me.
When we were writing, we were talking about the fact that both of us had been exposed accidentally like four different times and not gotten it, which is true. My wife even had it and I didn’t get it from her, and I was sleeping in the same bed. So, I was sort of feeling, ‘Oh I won’t get it,’ so I went to a concert the weekend before and I had picked it up at that concert.”
How do you describe Gretel? Can you relate to her?
Meli Povenmire: “She is very high energy, and I am very high energy. I’m trying to tone it down while I’m doing all these interviews. When I was younger, I talked a lot faster than I do now because now if I talk too fast, I stumble a lot. She’s very hyper, just like me. She reminds me a lot of myself when I was younger.”
- Michael Cimino and Liza Koshy Interview: Hamster & Gretel, Voice Work, and Tiny Rodents
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(Additional reporting by Kevin Finnerty.)
