I don’t know about your kids, but my kids are always drawing and coloring. When I say always, I mean, all the time! A few years ago, I got a really good advice from an animator, his advice was to encourage the kids’ artistic side let them draw and to provide them with as many tools to get this task accomplish. Well, that’s exactly what we did and still do to this day. When I learned that I will have the opportunity to interview the brilliant minds behind one of my kids’ favorite TV animated series, I could almost feel the anticipation building from within. Just to make it clear, I am talking about Disney’s five-time Emmy Award-winning series “Phineas and Ferb.” Yes, that right. My kids grew up watching Phineas and Ferb, so getting to speak to these geniuses was beyond uniquely cool not just personally but hey, it gets me an A+ for a cool mom. Right? 🙂 So, without further ado, here is our exclusive interview with Dan Povenmire & Jeff “Swampy” Marsh from Disney XD’s Milo Murphy’s Law.
Disney XD’s “Milo Murphy’s Law”:
Exclusive Interview with Dan Povenmire & Jeff “Swampy” Marsh
Before we continue with our executive Q&A with producers Dan Povenmire and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh (of the Emmy Award-winning animated series “Phineas and Ferb”). Let’s learn more about #MiloMurphysLaw, check out the video below.
“Milo Murphy’s Law” is an animated comedy series that follows 13-year-old Milo Murphy, the fictional great-great-great-great grandson of the Murphy’s Law namesake. Milo is the personification of Murphy’s Law, where anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.
If you or your kids were fans of Phineas and Ferb, you are going to love Milo Murphy’s Law. These two shows are both very family oriented, but Milo Murphy’s Law’s message is one of optimism and perseverance with a super fun intelligent comedic delivery. Which gets you wondering how these guys come up with such a concept. So, this is what they had to say.
Dan:
People have asked me a couple times, how did you deal with all of the adversity that happened to you in your career, for instance, and I always look back on that, I always scratch my head and think, was there — did I have adversity? And I look back, and there’s a lot of things that went wrong throughout that, and I think Swampy and I are both very positive in our outlook of life.
So when things go wrong, we just go around it. And people often think that you’re going down this path, and if you turn this way it’s success, and this way it’s failure. And that’s not at all what it is. It’s failure, failure, failure, failure, success, you know. You just have to keep going down whatever path you’re on, and if there’s failure here, you turn that way. If there’s failure here, you know you turn that way, and you just keep going.
And I think that’s part of what we were trying to do with Milo is that, things are going to go wrong for everybody. If there’s anything that we want the kids to know from this, it’s that if things go wrong in your life, don’t let it ruin your day, much less your life. Find the positive spin on it.
Jeff:
My little brother and I have always grown up with people saying, “I can’t believe you guys turned out the way you did.” My mom is now living in Montana with husband number seven, so there was some chaos growing up.
But we always thought, well, you know, it’s your choice, what you do with that. Either it buries you, or it makes you an interesting person, with a lot of experience that no one else had. And I always thought, when we started creating Milo, I always thought that was the coolest thing about a character like that, is that whatever life’s throwing at you, you go, “Well. I’m going to know how to deal with that. It’s going to make a little tougher. A little stronger. A little more interesting. A little more fun.” Whatever it is, that’s a great thing to know, because life’s going to throw stuff at everybody. And you have to figure out.
Dan:
Nobody really leads a charmed life. They just exist within the life that they have in a positive way.
Disney XD’s “Milo Murphy’s Law” – Danica McKellar Clip
When it comes to TV, we have a few rules. Number one the shows the kids watch, have to be family-friendly shows. And number two, no TV in their rooms, this way when we watch TV we are all together. So, how important is it for Dan and Jeff to create a show the whole family can watch together?
Dan:
We started Phineas it was right at the time where TV watching had gotten so segmented. What the research was showing was that every age group in the house had its own TV. So, family viewing as we remembered it, from when we were kids, had sort of disappeared. When we were kids, it was the whole family on the couch watching TV. It was everybody watching one show, and you had to pick something that everybody liked, and since that was no longer the norm, people weren’t doing as much shows with the whole family to do. So, when we hear that, to us, it just warms our heart, that we’re bringing back family viewing to the family.
Jeff:
I was recently on a ski lift with this 18-year-old kid, and I was making jokes about my 15-year-old son. That I was up here with a bunch of 15-year-olds and blah blah blah and we were talking. And he did that “what do you do?” and I said, “Well, I do cartoons for Disney.” Oh, what show? Said, “Well, I used to do a show called Phineas and Ferb.” And this 18-year-old went “Oh my God, dude, God, I gotta take a selfie with you.” I’d forgotten that now these kids that grew up on our show are 18, 19, 20, they’re in college.
And they have this language with their families, they have shared jokes because the show talked to everybody in the house. And I think that’s awesome. I had a guy when I was talking at a college, asked if I would call his dad and tell his dad to send him more money. As Monogram. I did it as Monogram. They shared that whole thing, and I did it. “I’m here with your son, and he’s doing very well in school, but he could probably use a few more bucks,” and I got a nice e-mail from him later, saying, “He sent more money. Thank you.” All of a sudden there is that shared humor, those shared jokes, those shared lines, that those families will have forever. And sometimes, it’s just singing the songs together.
Dan:
Part of it was just that we made the show to make each other laugh and to make the writers laugh. And we all have immature enough senses of humor that we also laugh at the stuff that the kids would laugh at, but we also, laugh at the jokes that the kids won’t get. And we always feel like, “Well, let’s just put everything that we think is funny in. And just make sure that there’s enough stuff in for the kids if they don’t get a reference or something like that.” Our only rule is, if the adult in the room laughs, and the kid asks what they’re laughing about, that conversation can’t be an uncomfortable conversation.
Jeff:
We’d rather have the conversation be because we did a joke about existentialist philosophy.
If you grew up loving ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic’s 80’s and 90’s renditions of this eras billboard hits, you are going to love Milo Murphy’s Law. If you didn’t know or you missed it above, Milo is voiced by ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic. So, how was it, working with Weird Al Yankovic, and how much influence does he have on Milo?
Dan:
He’s a horror to work with. No. He’s a wonderful, wonderful guy.
Jeff:
Somebody said the weirdest thing about him is just how normal he is.
Dan:
True. He’s super, super normal. He’s not as wacky as I think people expect him to be, except on stage. Or doing one of his videos. But he’s about the nicest guy that we know. And that’s part of why we ended up with him, is we were looking for somebody to have this very positive voice without sounding put on. And we auditioned hundreds of people for Milo. And we auditioned kids. Seasoned voice actors. People whose work we love. But when they try to do that super-positivity thing, it’d always come off sort of Pollyanna and false. And we just need to find somebody who just actually has that voice, ’cause the character is sort of modeled after a friend of ours who just sounds that way when he talks. And he just always sounds really positive.
And we needed to find somebody who has that positivity just naturally. And Weird Al came in and did a voice on Gravity Falls. And Alex, who runs Gravity Falls, posted it. Weird Al. Weird Al would be. I’ve seen him interviewed. He’s this super, super positive guy. What does he sound like? I had to look up an interview with him to remind myself what his voice sounded like. And we had him come in, and it was just immediately worked.
Jeff:
I was against it. We already auditioned literally hundreds of people. And I’m just, “No.” Just couldn’t take it. We wanted to hire the guy who was a friend of ours who works on another show. He’s really busy. So when Dan said “we’re going to read one more person,” I’m “fine, whatever, I don’t care.” And then he sent me the audition and I got up in the morning, and it was on an e-mail. So I’m literally sitting there in bed with my wife, and I play Weird Al’s voice. She goes, “Who’s that? ” I went, “It’s Weird Al. It’s really good.”
Dan:
It was a great find, and working with him is great. It’s the fact that we get to write songs and have Weird Al sing them, it just makes my high school self just, Weeee! And the funny thing is, during the course of Phineas there were several songs from the first season that were sort of popular, and then we would write our own Weird Al version of that song, later, and just sort of just change the lyrics, and make it for that particular instance. And that was always fun. We always called it our Weird Al version. Well, now, for Milo, we needed a song that we wrote something like that for Phineas.
So, I took the music from a song we wrote on Phineas and just rewrote the lyrics and made our own Weird Al version of a song from Phineas. For Milo, and actually got Weird Al to sing it. [LAUGHS] So, we wrote our own Weird Al version, and Weird Al, how bizarre is that?! So that’s really fun.
Jeff:
When you find somebody who really works, it lets you push the character a lot more than you normally would and that’s been really fun. And, also, I’d never worked with anybody that’s that prepared for everything, and especially the music stuff. So much better than we are. [LAUGHS]
Disney XD’s “Milo Murphy’s Law” Adventure Montage
Dan:
You know. We don’t read and write music. We can play, play and sing into a microphone, and then somebody else writes out the score and stuff like that, from that. And, so, he’ll come in for a song and he’ll go, “Yeah, on bar 12 here, you’ve got a dotted quarter note. But in the demo that you guys sang, it’s a dotted half note” or something. “Which one do you want to?” And we’re like, “I think it’s so cute that you think we know.” [LAUGHS] The answer to that.
Jeff:
And the other fun thing about Al, of all of the really big names that we have had come in and do voices on this show, those people geek out more about Al than anyone I know. And really famous people. Had somebody look down and go, “Al is coming — can I stay?” I’m like, “Yeah, of course.” Can I take a selfie? [LAUGHS]
Dan:
So, I read an article online that said that Weird Al’s fame has now eclipsed all of the people he used to parody back in the day. He’s still so relevant, and I think that that’s just a testament to his force of will. That he was able to do that. He created a job for himself, in which he could be a household name, basically, doing something that no one else in our lifetime has done for a living.
Jeff:
Playing the accordion.
Dan:
You know, playing the accordion, and making up different lyrics to existing songs. And he has made himself a household name, doing that. That’s just an amazing, you know, the force that he is.
One last finally question and this one is for all the moms that have little ones that love to draw or aspire to be animators themselves or all the kids reading this. What advice would you have for young kids who are into drawing and doodling?
Jeff:
Throw away their erasers. The whole thing that I always see people doing, or kids, that are drawing, or trying to create perfect drawings or beautiful drawings, and somebody much wiser than me once said, “I think there’s 10,000 bad drawings, and everybody, your job is to get them out as quickly as possible, and you only do that by doing more drawings.” Filling pages. When I started in animation, because I didn’t get trained in this. I think it was David Silverman was kind of one of the first guys who helped teach me, and he for a while said, “You should just draw with a Sharpie. It’ll keep you fiddling with stuff and fussing with stuff, it forces you just to make bold shapes.”And for a year, I didn’t draw with anything other than a Sharpie when I was drawing my own stuff, and it had a huge, positive impact. You can’t erase it. You can’t fiddle it. And I started filling books with drawings.
Jeff:
And my mom still has stuff that I drew, you know. More drawings, no erasing.
Thanks to Dan Povenmire & Jeff “Swampy” Marsh for taking the time and chatting with us. Disney XD’s “Milo Murphy’s Law” airs on Mondays, so check your local listings.
Disclosure: I was provided with an all-expense paid trip to Los Angeles, California to attend the #BeOurGuestEvent. No additional compensation was received.