Revisiting Milo Thatch: The Disney king of hot nerds

With Disney+'s launch earlier this month and the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, there's never been a better time to binge old favorites. This week, we're looking back at Disney hits and catching up on movies we missed the first time. Join us for a walk down memory lane.

Like a statistically and financially significant amount of the American population, I did not see Atlantis: The Lost Empire in theaters. I don’t know why. I was ten when it came out, maybe my parents couldn’t be bothered that summer. I saw it a few years later on DVD at a friend’s sleepover, which was probably for the best because Atlantis awakened something very specific and private in pre-teen me: the overwhelming desire to make out with nerds.

Before I saw Atlantis, the archetype of desirable men set before me in the late 90s and early 00s was bland and unappealing. I had no love for surfer boy beefcakes or suave, sultry boy bands with butt-cut hair and appalling denim choices. I myself was a nerd, a twitchy know-it-all who wanted to talk about ancient Egypt and Rome, the kid who read d'Aulaire’s books of Greek and Norse myths for fun on a Saturday. My parents worried about me, concerned that I needed intellectual stimulation and more friends, in that order, and I didn’t encounter a romantic ideal that appealed to those elements of my personality until Milo Thatch showed up in all of his animated glory.

For those who haven’t seen Atlantis: The Lost Empire, it’s a non-musical Disney animated movie about a geeky, fast-talking cartographer/linguist (that’s Milo!) who’s obsessed with finding the lost city of Atlantis. In his opening scene, Milo is dolled up in a sweater vest and enormous glasses, delivering a lecture on translating Norse runes and their connection to the lost civilization. From the get-go he comes off as clever and likable, even as his fellow academics dismiss him as a basket case, and as the movie progresses he uses his bookish expertise to guide an expedition to Atlantis itself. I fell for him immediately.

Milo’s awkward earnestness felt revolutionary and real, probably because I never understood how to be attracted to the intimidating Disney heroes of my childhood — the charming, graceful ones whose faces and bodies did most of the work for them. When he tripped over his words in his enthusiasm, I heard myself stuttering in class out of sheer excitement for what I was learning, and when his wide-eyed optimism won the hearts of those who bullied him, he gave me hope that my nerdiness could someday lead me to do the same.

I revisited Atlantis: The Lost Empire a few days after Disney+ launched, barely remembering the plot but still remembering how hot the torch I carried for Milo burned. I was pleasantly surprised to see that seventeen years later, the man holds up. Beyond his lanky frame and floppy hair, he acts in the movie as an anticapitalist hero who happily surrenders his expertise to Princess Kida, his Atlantean love interest who obviously knows more about her culture than he does. Even when she asks him for help to translate Atlantean runes, he steps up to the challenge but refuses to take credit, later referring to the discovery they made together as something “Kida taught me.” Your mansplainer could never.

It's not original to be attracted to kind, respectful dudes with Oxford degrees and nice glasses, but for an animated character released in 2001 Milo gets credit for being different to what came before. Prince Charming is totally fine for some; my inner myth girl would just prefer an absent-minded professor.