Recently, this article about Disney’s cartoon, Miles from Tomorrowland popped up on my Facebook feed. The article, titled “Google, NASA work together on Disney show to inspire girls into science,” describes Disney’s efforts to involve professionals from Google and NASA to help create a more representative strong female character in the cartoon to help attract girls to the STEM fields. The concept is interesting (and long overdue). The show’s creator, Sascha Paladina said, “We want all kids to get interested in science, but we really felt that is was important for girls in particular to see strong female characters.” To that end, the creators worked with several female engineers to understand the field of engineering with the goal of making the character Loretta into a strong female character representative of engineers actually working in the field. I don’t have children, so this cartoon hadn’t crossed my radar, but basing a female character on engineers sounded like a step in the right direction, so I decided to check it out.
Miles from Tomorrowland centers around a family in space, with an “adventure-seeking boy” and “his smart sister who codes.” Sounds good so far. But, then I realized the “Miles” from the title actually refers to “Miles” the brother, aka the “adventure-seeking boy.” So, Loretta, the “smart sister who codes,” is already, at best, a secondary character. As commenters in the above article noted, Miles is more prominent in the promo materials, with Loretta standing slightly behind. Looking further into the show’s promo materials on Amazon, I found the same thing. Well, actually, I found a lot of promo shots that only included Miles, and very few that included Loretta. Clearly, Miles is the start of the show. If Disney is serious about creating a representative female character, why not make her more visible?
On Amazon, the plot of the first episode of Miles from Tomorrowland is described as “Miles saves Loretta and his family from aliens.” So, spoiler alerts, the damsel will need to be saved. The first episode starts off with the father giving Miles and Loretta a toy building kit (similar to LEGO, but not LEGO). Loretta wants to follow the directions and create the toy as intended. Miles wants to ignore the instructions and make something entirely new from the pieces in the kit. Dad steps in with the lesson that sometimes we need instructions and sometimes we need to think for ourselves. This worries me a bit because, here, Loretta is not being portrayed as a strong female character. She’s being portrayed as someone who can follow directions. The story goes on, and the family is called to go and save something from another planet. Upon arrival, Loretta pulls out the instructions on how to complete the mission, but Miles, again, would rather just figure it out on his own. (To me this all sounds so stereotypically familiar: women want to get directions; men never ask for directions.) Loretta then wanders off to read her instructions, and ends up getting lost and then finding herself needing to be saved. But, no worries, Miles comes to the rescue! As the scene played out, I again got the message that while sometimes instructions can be good, sometimes it’s better if we think for ourselves, something Miles is already inherently good at, but Loretta struggles with.
I found the episode disappointing. Given that the show is called Miles from Tomorrowland, and the main character is Miles himself, perhaps they were trying to set Miles up as the smart, strong one in this episode. I can’t help but wonder, though, if they truly wanted a strong female character, why didn’t they make Loretta a main character, with as much visibility as Miles? Surely, Miles and Loretta could both have been main characters? Loretta is at times portrayed as a smart character (as long as she has instructions, of course) who can allegedly code, but we don’t see any of this in the first episode. The closest Loretta comes to coding, or even working with computers at all in the first episode, is when she does a Google-type search so she can get Miles the information he needs to save the day. Perhaps it gets better as the series progresses, but what I saw in this first episode was that Loretta is all about instructions, while Miles is all about invention.
If Disney is looking at Loretta as a strong female character with the goal of getting more girls interested in STEM, it’s important they get her right. In the article above Google directly references the importance of getting her right by highlighting that their “research showed a direct link between the paucity of females in science featured in the media and the low rate of girls pursuing science, technology, engineering and math careers.” So, let’s make strong female characters. Let’s show them thinking for themselves. And, let’s not constantly hide them behind the strong, male, main character.
