In 1957, Walt Disney aired Mars and Beyond, the twelfth episode of their fourth season, bringing the promise of science and technology into the great American living room. Along with its predecessor Man in Space (1955), the show captured mid-century optimism about progress—but at the expense of history. To sell this futuristic vision, the Middle Ages were cast as history’s “dark slums.”

Within five minutes of Mars and Beyond, narrator Paul Frees declares that for “over a thousand years, free and logical thought was stifled by a black period of stupidity, superstition, and sorcery”—a narrative supposedly corrected by the Renaissance. This is one of the earliest televised examples of the religion vs. science trope that continues to shape how filmmakers portray the medieval world.

It seems a little uncharitable to call out how modern artists get things wrong about the long-past, but many viewers will only ever look at the Middle Ages through the lens of modern storytelling, which means their understanding of history and thus of the wider world will be shaped by what they see through that lens even as changing ideas about history shape the kinds of stories we tell. Carrying around ideas like “the greatest king of England during the fourteenth century was actually the son of William Wallace, a rebel ahead of his time who was murdered for his republican ideals of freedom” (from Mel Gibson’s 1995 Braveheart) or “if only the children of vikings had the benefit of a modern, scientific way of thinking, then their inherently violent and exploitative bigotry could be abandoned in favor of an ideal society” (Dreamwork’s whole How to Train Your Dragon franchise) reinforces the idea that the Middle Ages was a time of abject barbarism and ignorant, authoritarian bigotry.

It seems a little uncharitable to call out how modern artists get things wrong about the long-past, but many viewers will only ever look at the Middle Ages through the lens of modern storytelling, which means their understanding of history and thus of the wider world will be shaped by what they see through that lens even as changing ideas about history shape the kinds of stories we tell. Carrying around ideas like “the greatest king of England during the fourteenth century was actually the son of William Wallace, a rebel ahead of his time who was murdered for his republican ideals of freedom” (from Mel Gibson’s 1995 Braveheart) or “if only the children of vikings had the benefit of a modern, scientific way of thinking, then their inherently violent and exploitative bigotry could be abandoned in favor of an ideal society” (Dreamwork’s whole How to Train Your Dragon franchise) reinforces the idea that the Middle Ages was a time of abject barbarism and ignorant, authoritarian bigotry.