@shawbridge All that being said, we are in a much better situation that the 1960s-1980s. Multiple representations of positive examples of scientists and engineers have definitely helped. Scientists and engineers can be heroes and the star of a story, and scientists are not always either evil or weak, side characters. The popularity of many movies about well know smart people, like The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything, A Beautiful Mind, Hidden Figures, etc, also show a changing attitude.
But again, this also is generational. Millennials, Gen-Zs and Gen-X are the ones who are driving the interest in these movies, for the most part. For examples, there were many popular films about scientists and engineers until the mid 1950s, and then almost nothing until the 1990s, and there has recently been an explosion.
Still, the tropes still rule: