The Avengers – “Mission… Highly Improbable”

Scene: The office of the foreign diplomat/enemy spy. The bound Mrs. Peel is seated in a chair, the miniaturized tank and Steed are on the desk next to her.

mhi03 — “It’s a dream. A dream. A tiny dream.”

mhi05 — “Ow! Well, you’re real enough, but…how?”

“Rushton built some infernal machine, Chivers used it on the tank…”

“…and you just happened to be inside.”

“How did you guess?”

mhi06a — “Tell me, Steed, is everything to scale?” “Ha-ha.”

If my size fetish can be said to have an ambition, it is to have a giantess gaze at me as impishly as Mrs. Peel does here with Steed.

Steed cuts Mrs. Peel’s bonds with a letter-opener (!), retrieves the office door key by crawling under the door jamb, and stabbing the guard in the ankle with a fountain pen so that Mrs. Peel can subdue him. Now Mrs. Peel has to carry Steed out of the building and even exchange some dialogue with him. It being a 1960s television series, however, they don’t have the budget for a live-action handheld scene. In fact, there aren’t any special effects at all during the episode; they do everything with props.

So how do they do it? Mrs. Peel somehow has a small drawstring pouch, perfect for containing the tiny Steed and dangling from her hand.

mhi09 — “Where are we going?” “I’m trying to get you king-sized again.”

Chivers (the traitor who wants to sell the reducing machine to the enemy) has helpfully miniaturized a gazebo on the embassy grounds, and Mrs. Peel determines that she can sneak the tiny Steed inside before Chivers reverses the process.

mhi12 — “I’m not sure I shouldn’t keep you like this…”

mhi13 — “…after all, it’s one way to bag a man.”

mhi14 — “What happens now?” “Stay and await developments. Big developments.”

Mrs. Peel gets reduced briefly, but all we really get to see is her crawling about the giant desk for a bit. One version of the teleplay had Chivers capturing the tiny Mrs. Peel in his butterfly net; oh, to see her thrashing!

Originally posted: 29 January 2016