Molly of Denali breaks new ground
LOS ANGELES — Children’s television has made heroes out of a bookish aardvark, a singing dinosaur and pizza-munching turtles. It’s about time a Native American girl got a shot.
“Molly of Denali,” new this week on PBS, breaks new ground with its casting, furthering the case that, when it comes to diversity, kids’ programming leads the way.
“Dora the Explorer,” which Nickelodeon premièred in 2000, cleared a path for more Latino representation on the airwaves. Disney’s “Doc McStuffins,” wrapping up its fifth and final season, triggered more than $500 million in merchandise sales in 2013 — a record for a toy line based on a Black character, according to the New York Times. TPT’s “Hero Elementary,” a science series due to première in 2020, will pay just as much attention to diversity as it does to brainpower.
But Molly Mabray is the first star of an animated children’s show to be a proud, contributing member of a Native American tribe, sharing her adventures from her Alaska home with young viewers across the country.
“We’re going to see Molly and her friends doing everything from dogsledding to working in her garden to travelling with her mom, who is a bush pilot who can’t land the plane because there’s a moose in the runway,” said Lesli Rotenberg, PBS’ chief programming executive for children’s media and education.
“We’re highlighting important values, like knowing who you are, accepting what life brings and honouring your elders. While these values are specific to the Alaskan Native community, they’re also universal.”
Kids from all backgrounds can relate to Molly’s obsessions with the internet, sports, animals and music. But there’s almost always a twist. The 10-year-old uses the computer to monitor a bald eagle watching over her eggs. She may shoot baskets, but she’d rather be competing in a birch-canoe race.
She’s determined to heal her grandpa’s emotional wounds after she learns that he lost his love of music after the boarding school he was forced to attend as a child forbade him from playing his people’s songs.
She bonds with an intimidating aunt after the two of them come up with a new tribal name for her. No lemonade stand for Molly; instead, she answers phones at the family’s trading post.
“She’s learning these traditional practices, like snowshoeing or hunting for agate stones, but she’s also just an everyday kid that’s super-relatable,” said the show’s creative producer, Princess Daazhraii Johnson.
Johnson, a 13-year Hollywood veteran who grew up in Alaska, is uniquely qualified to lead the series. Her younger brother, Evon Peter, was the youngest chief in Arctic Village, Alaska. She also has two children at home who are members of the show’s target audience.
“Every once in a while when I’m looking at clips for the show,” Johnson said, “my eight-year-old will come along and say something like, ‘Mom, that’s our Native food.’
“I live for those moments. We get to see ourselves represented in this beautiful, positive light, and we are informing what our image looks like.”