Creative Keynote: Dan Povenmire

The second day of the TV Kids Festival wrapped with a fun and inspiring conversation with Dan Povenmire, co-creator of Phineas and Ferb and creator of the brand-new Hamster & Gretel.

Povenmire took part in a conversation with Anna Carugati, group editorial director of TV Kids, as part of the second creative keynote of day two of the TV Kids Festival. The hitmaker worked on such shows as Hey Arnold!, The Simpsons, Rocko’s Modern Life, SpongeBob SquarePants and Family Guy before teaming with Jeff “Swampy” Marsh to create Phineas and Ferb. The multitalented Povenmire is an animator, voice actor, director, music composer and executive producer.

“I think I have a mutation of a gene that means you only have to sleep five hours a night, which gives you a lot of time to finish things that you didn’t finish during the day,” Povenmire quipped.

He said he’s been drawing since he was 2 years old and by 12 was already making money as an artist. “I used to do pen-and-ink limited edition prints and go to all the art shows in the Gulf Coast area—I grew up in Alabama—and I would do these juried art shows where you would just send in your art, and they would decide whether you were good enough to be in that art show. They never asked [for] an age or a picture of the artist, and I would show up and they would ask, So where’s your dad? And I would say, No, it’s me! I was very successful at a very young age doing that, and I was being recruited by some art colleges, but I didn’t want to do art; I wanted to make movies. I used the money that I was making there to get a Super 8 movie camera and projector with sound and an editing machine, and I was making movies with my friends. I was making animated movies, too. I never got into the film school at USC, which is where I was trying to go, but I took nothing but film classes, and then dropped out, so I’m a college drop-out. I’m a cautionary tale! Don’t do that! Then I just sort of fell backward into animation because I’d always been able to draw and I loved filmmaking, and to me, it became a mix of those two things.”

His animation break ended up being “a really weird fluke,” Povenmire said. “I was doing caricatures on Olvera Street—I found out years later that Chuck Jones did that same job when he was young, in the same place. I had one day a week off, and a friend of mine called and said, ‘Dan, you do animation, right?’ And then, like two phone calls later, I was talking to Tommy Chong of Cheech & Chong. He was making his first movie without Cheech, and he wanted an animated dream sequence. So I came down to the editing room and gave him some of my stuff and he loved it.”

After that animated sequence in Far Out Man, Povenmire began to build up his animation and storyboarding credits, eventually landing a job at The Simpsons. He soon realized that animation was exactly where he should be.

Carugati asked Povenmire about the long journey to get Phineas and Ferb commissioned. “I drew Phineas on some butcher paper tablecloth at a restaurant. He was drawn in purple crayon in 1993. Swampy [Jeff Marsh] and I were writing together on a show called Rocko’s Modern Life. We wanted to do a show together. So I took that picture of Phineas home and I drew Perry, Doofenshmirtz and Ferb that night and brought it in and said, ‘Hey, what about these guys?’ I had an idea of who they all were, and we built the whole world around that and immediately went out and started pitching it. We just got noes from all of the studios.”

While Marsh moved to the U.K., Povenmire continued to pitch the concept wherever he could. “Fox Kids loved it, but they didn’t have a slot that season. And then they got bought out and all of those projects disappeared. It’s a heartbreaking process when you get close, close, close. I would get up the echelons at Nickelodeon, and then the number two guy would say, ‘No, I don’t get it.’ That happened a bunch over that time. I always felt like I should continue to pitch this show because this is the show that I want to see, and if I want to see it, I think other people are going to want to see it. That’s what I did.”

Even the initial Disney pitch was not immediately successful, Povenmire noted. “They said, ‘No, we’re not looking for a show with boy characters as the lead; we’re looking for a girl show right now. But we’ll keep the packet.’” A year later, Disney was looking for boy properties. “One of the junior executives pulled that out of the trash and said, ‘Well, I always liked this,’ and they called and just left a message on the machine: ‘We want to option Phineas and Ferb, who’s your agent?’ And I was like, Oh, I better get an agent then, shouldn’t I?”

After prepping a storyboard, Povenmire then made an animatic. “Everybody who saw that knew immediately what the show was going to be, even though it was all my voice. It felt like they were already watching a show and they didn’t have to imagine what these words on the paper were going to be like when they’re done. I think that was the best selling tool I’ve ever had. Every show I’ve sold since then, I’ve sold on the basis of an animatic rather than a script or rather than a pitch.”

Carugati then asked Povenmire about his latest Disney Channel pickup, Hamster & Gretel. On how that idea came about, Povenmire said, “Well, my daughters both got hamsters at one point—who have since passed on, sadly, because they’re very fragile. And we had a production coordinator named Greta, and somehow Hamster and Greta came out of there. I had drawn a hamster superhero character, just as a doodle once, and I thought it was really funny, and I was pitching ideas for it to my daughter, and she was laughing. Somebody said, ‘You should have Greta in it and then you could call it Hamster and Greta.’ But I felt Hamster already plays off Hansel, so I should just make it Gretel so that it connects better in people’s brains. Then I just started drawing stuff for it.”

Povenmire then talked about the feedback he gets directly from audiences. “People have actually written me and said this cartoon saved my life,” Povenmire said. “I’ve probably had seven or eight other people on Instagram or Twitter or TikTok tell me that this show saved their lives because depression destroys lives all the time, and getting people to laugh makes a big difference. I think that we, working in TV and especially in comedy, often sort of poo-poo what we do as not important. It’s vitally important. I think it makes a huge difference in people’s lives to lighten their day and give them something to look forward to and give them something to laugh at. I think it makes people feel more human.”

Povenmire then talked about managing production amid COVID-19 shutdowns. “The good thing is this happened just [when] technology had progressed to the point where this is something we can almost easily do from home. If this had happened five or ten years ago, this would have been much harder to do.”

Povenmire and Marsh were heading into the editing stage for Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Candace Against the Universe for Disney+ when lockdowns hit Los Angeles. “I was able to sit here at the desk that I’m at right now, on my Cintiq, and draw over stuff. The editor would pause there for a second, and I could draw the correction on top of that, and she could see it, the post-production supervisor could see it, the PA could see it. Everyone could see it and download it, print it and send it to the overseas studios. All of that was possible because of technology. We just really never missed a beat.”

On the opportunities for young artists breaking into animation today, Povenmire commented, “I think it’s easier today. You have much more contact with people through the internet, through social media. When I was coming up, if I made a movie or a little piece of animation, I had to carry around a Super 8 projector with a cord and reels. There was a whole box full of stuff I had to carry just to show somebody any portion of it. Then you had videotapes, which was easier. Now, you can just send it to somebody’s phone. People are doing stuff online on YouTube and TikTok that are getting as [many] views as a lot of TV shows get.

“What would I have accomplished if, when I was 15, making Super 8 movies for my friends, I could have shown them to the world? How quickly would I have gotten better at it with the tools that we have available to us now? I’m thrilled for people who are coming up” in this environment.