It’s not every morning you wake up, pour a coffee, and immediately find yourself deep into Miles From Tomorrowland, watching an animated space family chase down a cosmic banjo. Béla Fleck and Sascha Paladino seem delighted by this—probably because they spent years turning this exact fever-dream premise into something that actually works.
“I came up with this story,” Paladino says, “and then the work is getting the magic into it.” He's talking about inventing a fictional instrument called the Plectrix. But the whole thing began long before Disney Junior showed up—back in 2008 with Throw Down Your Heart, the documentary the pair made exploring the banjo’s origins across Africa. That trip, Fleck says, was a hinge point. “We had this magical experience together, and Sasha chronicled it.”
Paladino never shook it. “I noticed how amazing it was when Béla worked with musicians who didn’t even share the same language,” he tells me. “When he started playing, they would just suddenly get it. It didn’t matter what country we were in—a pure, instant form of communication.” That idea became the backbone of Miles, where the Callisto family zips around the galaxy making friends, solving problems, and occasionally escaping danger through music. “I wanted this idea of connecting the universe,” Paladino adds. “Breaking down walls between cultures. That’s something Béla’s done his whole career.”
That’s probably why the show features the immortal line: “You seriously think a musical instrument can save us right now?” delivered by Miles’ slightly cynical sister. “It’s like—actually, yeah,” Paladino laughs. “That’s the whole point.”
Fleck backs him up with decades of proof. “When I traveled with New Grass Revival from ’81 to ’90, the State Department was sending us everywhere—Bangladesh, India, Turkey, Morocco,” he says. “And I discovered I could ask them to find musicians for me to jam with. They kind of had to do it. And you start playing with people you’ve never met, in a country you’ve never been, and everyone lights up. The ambassador lights up. Everybody.”
That curiosity eventually led them to Africa for Throw Down Your Heart, and in a roundabout way, to a space-age kids’ show featuring a banjo-coded alien instrument. “These eleven minutes of Miles may have been twenty years in the making,” Paladino says.
The Plectrix itself—this mysterious, glowing, almost mythic sound-source—ended up being… well, a banjo. “It just felt right,” Paladino says. “It’s a magical sound. Otherworldly. And to me it’s always been around.”
But the twist is that the “alien” banjo is also Béla. “We had him play two different banjos,” Paladino explains. “His regular one for Miles’ side, and the baritone banjo for the alien. So when you hear this kind of ‘Dueling Banjos’ moment in the episode—it’s all Béla playing against himself.” Fleck shrugs. “You don’t always know what you’re supposed to do,” he admits. “But you know what you’re not supposed to do. So you get into that frame. As an improviser, a lot of things happen unconsciously.”
He got the video a day before recording and started messing around. “When I sat down to record along with the video, it was more like—let’s just see what comes.” What came was so effective that Paladino ripped out the original score for an entire scene. “I thought we’d mix it in lightly, but once he started playing, I realized—this is the score. The music becomes part of the story. When the characters fall into an underground cavern, the music shifts with them.”
Even the name Plectrix came from Paladino’s instinct. “I wanted something vaguely musical, based on ‘plectrum,’ but mostly I just liked how it sounded.” The show is full of quiet homages like that—characters named after musicians they met in Uganda and Mali, planets named for ancestral instruments, little nods to the journey that started all of this.
“We try to put a lot of layers in there,” Paladino says. “We want the show to inspire kids—to think about their place in the world, how they connect with others, how families work together. And maybe even to learn a little about outer space. Or the banjo. Who knows?”
Listen to the interview above and then check out a clip from the episode below.
