"You can't be what you can't see."
-Sally Ride

In the spring of 2024, a new show called “Jurassic World: Chaos Theory” premiered on Netflix. It’s a sequel to a show called “Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous” and is an animated show featuring voice actors. It’s relevant to this article because our patient, Kiersten Kelly, plays a character that has a limb difference. Animated characters with upper limb differences are pretty rare!

Kiersten plays a character who has an acquired limb difference, an amputation, but Kiersten’s real-life limb difference is congenital—she was born with a shortened right arm. In the clip below, Kiersten, the showrunner and the writers (one of whom also has an upper limb difference) chat about representation and more:

Film and TV have come a long way from the villainous “one-armed man” in “The Fugitive” TV series that began airing in 1963. But progress is not always linear. “The Witches,” a 2020 film starring Anne Hathaway, created a lot of controversy in the limb difference community. In it, Anne Hathaway’s character, the Grand High Witch, has misshapen hands and missing fingers that she hides under her gloves, a plot detail that stayed true to the book, which was written by Roald Dahl in 1983. Many individuals with hand differences took exception to this portrayal. This idea that disabled equals evil is a trope that writers need to let go of.

For more representation, Netflix seems to have the corner on upper limb differences. In 2019, a French film was released called “I Lost My Body,” which features a young man dealing with the aftermath of an upper limb amputation. It was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 92nd Academy Awards. There’s also a short film titled “Forgive Us Our Trespasses” that was released in 2022. While this film wasn’t nominated for an Oscar, it does give an idea of what it was like to be living with a disability in Nazi Germany.

Our patient Jon Kondelik, below, was in a film called "Rise of the Zombies" — because it's important to have representation amongst zombies, too!

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Of course, media doesn’t just mean film and TV. There are books and podcasts and video games. Did you know Link from The Legend of Zelda is technically an amputee? It’s all video game lore, and of course Link has a magic prosthesis, so it’s hard to tell. For books, there are several memoirs out there, including one by our patient Jason Koger. As for podcasts, there are actually two different podcasts called “Life and Limb”, and they both feature people with an upper limb difference. There is also the wide world that is YouTube, and another place to check out is the Easterseals Disability Film Challenge channel. There you’ll find Kiersten Kelly, who we wrote about above, and our patient Angel Giuffria, and both are featured in their own short films, "Emergency Contact and Call the A.D.A." Speaking of Angel, she’s been in quite a few ads and commercials and modeled for Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive, and that’s her in the photo at the top of this article, featured in an episode of “White Rabbit Project.”

“Emergency Contact”

Maybe there will be more interest from Hollywood in telling the stories of people with limb difference if the upcoming movie “Unstoppable” does well. We’re not talking about the 2010 film about a runaway train starring Denzel Washington! This film is about Anthony Robles, a wrestler who has a congenital above knee limb difference. He won the 2011 NCAA individual wrestling national championship in the 125-pound weight class, and the movie is about his journey. It premieres in December and will be streaming on Amazon Prime in early 2025. It is notable, however, that while the film does feature a person with a lower limb difference, the actor portraying the character does not have a limb difference.

If you or someone you know is interested in receiving prosthetic care from the most experienced upper limb specialist team in the country, please contact us. If you would like to leave a comment, please do so below.

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