Posts From Author: annie

Life in 2D: Dan Povenmire on the Greatest Cartoons Ever, Salsa Music, and Not Being A Jerk

Dan Povenmire is perhaps best known as the co-creator of the Disney Channel smash hit Phineas and Ferb. Though born in California, he was raised in Mobile, Alabama, where he discovered the joys of drawing and movie-making. He went to the University of South Alabama and USC School of Cinematic Art before embarking on a busy career as a writer, television director, producer, storyboard artist and actor. He’s worked on some of the biggest animated series of our time, including The Simpsons, Rocko’s Modern Life, SpongeBob SquarePants, Hey Arnold, and Family Guy, for which he was nominated for an Annie in 2005. He’s been nominated for ten Emmys in four different categories, including songwriting and voiceover performance, and won one for his writing. (We profiled Dan at greater length here.) I spoke to Dan this week about Phineas and Ferb‘s genesis and why Bullwinkle Moose would be the ultimate weapon in the event of a zombie apocalypse. Charles Arrowsmith: You and Jeff (“Swampy”) Marsh were pitching Phineas and Ferb on and off from the early 90s until Disney picked it up in 2007. What would a mid-90s Phineas and Ferb have looked like? Has its evolution been affected by the projects you’ve worked on, from The Simpsons onwards? Dan Povenmire: I think Phineas would […]
Read More

Phineas and Ferb… and Dan Povenmire

http://youtu.be/w2nVcuwF_0A There’s a hundred and four days of summer vacation And school comes along just to end it So the annual problem for our generation Is finding a good way to spend it… So begins every episode of the Disney Channel’s smash hit Phineas and Ferb, which since 2007 has entertained millions of children worldwide. Four seasons, a TV movie, and crossover specials featuring characters from Marvel Comics and Star Wars later, it’s the channel’s longest-running original series. It has a large and devoted following among adults as well as kids — its guest stars over the years have included Malcolm McDowell, Damian Lewis, Sandra Oh, Allison Janney, Ben Stiller, and, surreally, most of the principal cast of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Jake Gyllenhaal and Chaka Khan are fans. Its creators, Jeff “Swampy” Marsh and Dan Povenmire, pitched and re-pitched the show for sixteen years before it was finally picked up; their confidence was evidently well placed. So who are Phineas and Ferb? Phineas Flynn is a tenacious, loquacious, enterprising, triangle-headed little American boy whose mission in life is to ensure that things are never dull. Ferb Fletcher is his rectangle-headed British half-brother (voiced by Thomas Sangster, whom you may remember […]
Read More

Bloody Brilliant Michael Friedman

Michael Friedman is the composer and lyricist behind an astonishing range of theatrical output over the last fifteen years. He wrote his first musical for The Civilians, a downtown theatre group he helped co-found in 2001. Canard, Canard, Goose? was also The Civilians’ first show, taking as its subject alleged geese abuse on the set of the Hollywood movie Fly Away Home. The Civilians’ method of working is a little like verbatim theatre in that the shows are based on interviews with real people. What’s different is that the final product is a heightened version of what emerged from those interviews, as you can probably tell from the sublimely silly Canard (the plot of which effectively disintegrates when the Civilians team realises that the movie wasn’t in fact shot in the hamlet where it was set but in Ontario). You can hear the whole show in this podcast recording of the 10th anniversary concert performance at Joe’s Pub. Canard set the offbeat tone for an eclectic career. Friedman went on to write the music for a series of shows, some with The Civilians, some not, including In the Bubble, based on the John Travolta movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble; the children’s show Katie Couric’s The Brand […]
Read More