"A Special, Special Agent": Defamiliarized Disability in World of Giants

abstract: This article analyzes the 1959 TV show World of Giants , which narrates its six-inch-tall protagonist Mel Hunter's struggle to live and work as a miniaturized spy in a normative environment. This defamiliarized experience of speculative impairment can be read productively in a disability register, rendering legible the show's critique of structural inaccessibility and complicating past scholarship's queer readings with a crip interpretation of Mel's non-normative gender and relationships with his "normal" companions. This argument combats disability's erasure in broadcast history scholarship and intervenes in conventional narratives regarding mid-century disability representation.