Doc McStuffins

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  Sweet Deals

  February 16, 2025 at 9:54 am

  Doc McStuffins is a bright young girl who uses her magical stethoscope to bring toys to life. It’s very useful in her job repairing damaged toys for the benefit of their owners. Doc makes clear observations and uses sensible logic when she does her repairs, and she also has a very gentle and kind beside manner and listens to her patients whenever they have a problem. The show cleverly uses stories about fixing broken toys as analogies for real medical conditions and anxieties that real children may have. Doc McStuffins treats its subject matter very gently, sometimes too gently. Like many shows of its era, Doc McStuffins is highly saccharine, especially when Doc and her toys are singing playful songs about things that most ordinary children and parents would consider preachy or nagging, such as washing your face or wearing a helmet. In the first three seasons, Doc McStuffins repairs toys in a clubhouse in her backyard she calls her “clinic”. By the fourth season, the show changes focus to Doc running a full-sized hospital for toys in a magical world inhabited entirely by living toys.

  Disney didn’t have a “not-so-secret gay agenda” in 2012 when Doc McStuffins was first created. However, while reviewing the series, I discovered an episode late in the fourth season (“The Emergency Plan”) that featured a family with two mothers. They were not a human family, but a toy family, and in true intersectional fashion, they were also an interracial black-and-white couple. This episode came out in 2017; the same year I stopped visiting the public library because I saw a staggering increase in children’s books that were discreetly normalizing homosexuality by sneaking it into narratives where it wasn’t necessary in order to make it appear more ordinary than it is. In my book, homosexuality has no business being in anything intended for children. It’s not simply because I consider homosexual lifestyles to be unhealthy and inappropriate. It’s also an ideological litmus test for me. If your book or show is willing to compromise objective truths for the sake of “compassion” or social relevance, then I become suspicious of whatever follows because there’s no telling what other things you might be lying about and what other warped lessons you might be trying to teach. It erases all of the goodwill that the show had otherwise built up over the years.

  Which leads me to a much later episode. “The Great McStuffins Meltdown” is a special double-sized movie episode in the fifth season. Doc upgrades her toy hospital with so many machines it’s almost entirely automated. However, she later discovers that the amount of electricity her new hospital uses is causing the Toy Arctic to melt and is endangering all the toys who live there. Why? Because there’s a giant power strip buried underneath the Toy Arctic, and all the extra electricity flowing out of it is causing it to overheat. The only solution is to turn off the switch and leave the entire town of McStuffinsville in the dark, and then change their power supply to green energy. This episode came out in 2020 and is exactly the sort of thing I worry about when the appearance of being socially relevant becomes more important than honesty. It’s a bad quality to have if you’re a doctor who wants your patients to consider you and your advice to be trustworthy.

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