Leland Melvin appears in cartoon form voicing himself in a new “Hey A.J.!” episode that lands on Disney+ on April 8, bringing a real NASA astronaut into a children’s animated story about dreaming beyond Earth.
The episode, titled “Time In A Bottle,” centers on A.J. and her friends as they discover Melvin’s childhood time capsule and learn he was once a kid who wanted to become an astronaut. It then cuts to a video message from the International Space Station, where Melvin opens with, “Hey, everybody, what’s up?” and follows with, “Well, me actually. I didn’t think I’d ever get to explore outer space.” He closes the clip by telling viewers, “I’m proof that if you keep dreaming big, you too can be out of this world.”
Melvin’s appearance fits a series built around a young girl named A.J. and her toy stuffed bunny, Theo, and adds a real-space pedigree to a show conceived and executive-produced by Martellus Bennett. The astronaut’s career already gives the story weight: Melvin flew two Space Shuttle Atlantis missions, STS-122 and STS-129, before taking part in the recorded message that appears in the episode.
The timing also links the show to a broader space moment. The new episode lands just after NASA’s Artemis 2 mission and a lunar flyby mentioned as having occurred Monday, April 6, giving the animated special a timely orbit around real-world exploration. That makes the episode more than a celebrity cameo. It turns Melvin’s path from childhood dreamer to space traveler into part of a kids’ story built to make that leap feel possible.
The contrast is the point. “Hey A.J.!” is a playful musical series, but the astronaut’s own words make the message plain: the distance between a kid with a dream and a person speaking from space can be crossed. In this case, the show does not just tell children to reach for the stars. It shows one of them doing it.
