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Fantastic Voyage

Fantastic Voyage

  • When a blood clot renders a scientist comatose, a submarine and its crew are shrunk and injected into his bloodstream in order to save him.
  • Scientist Jan Benes (Jean Del Val), who knows the secret to keeping soldiers shrunken for an indefinite period, escapes from behind the Iron Curtain with the help of C.I.A. Agent Grant (Stephen Boyd). While being transferred, their motorcade is attacked. Benes strikes his head, causing a blood clot to form in his brain. Grant is ordered to accompany a group of scientists as they are miniaturized. They have one hour to get to Benes' brain, remove the clot, and get out. — Brian Washington <[email protected]>
  • The battle being waged by the super powers is who can perfect miniaturization. Now both sides are stumped as to how to control it. So far, they can miniaturize anything, but up to sixty minutes only. Scientist Jan Benes (Jean Del Val), who is believed to have solved it, was about to give it to the Americans when an attempt is made on his life. Fortunately, he is not dead, but he is in a coma and any conventional means to operate on him could be fatal. So a plan is made to miniaturize a vessel, send a team of doctors into his body, and that they will go to the damaged area and fix it. The problem is that there is a report that someone on the team could be working for the other side. So they send C.I.A. Agent Grant (Stephen Boyd) to make sure everything goes okay. — [email protected]
  • Brilliant scientist Jan Benes (Jean Del Val) develops a way to shrink humans and other objects for brief periods of time. He, who is working in Communist Russia, is transported by the C.I.A. to America, but is attacked en route. In order to save him, who has developed a blood clot in his brain, a team of Americans in a nuclear submarine is shrunk and injected into his body. They have sixty minutes to fix the clot and get out before the miniaturization wears off. — Jwelch5742
  • A commercial airliner lands at JFK Airport in New York. A Secret Serviceman (Ken Scott), backed by a large Army contingent, greets the plane. After it taxis to a stop, Lieutenant Charles Grant USN (Stephen Boyd) steps out onto a mobile boarding ramp, verifies the Secret Service escort, and then signals to the other passenger, Jan Benes (Jean Del Val), to deplane with him. Benes walks down and gets into the Secret Service car, but not before warmly shaking Grant's hand one last time. But as the motorcade enters a run-down section of New York, a car hurtles out of an alley and broadsides Benes' car. Hastily the Secret Service transfer Benes to another car, which then must make a quick escape as the Secret Service contingent fights a gun battle with several other assailants in the surrounding buildings. Benes is taken to the underground headquarters of the Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces (CMDF) and given a full physical examination, including an EEG. The results are dire: he has suffered a stroke on the left side, in an inoperable spot. The doctors induce a coma so that his brain will not damage itself, while they decide what to do. The original Secret Service man then picks up Grant and delivers him to an alley, instructing him to stay in the car and wait. Then the car, with Grant alone in it, descends to an underground complex. A small scooter bearing the CMDF logo, which he does not recognize, picks him up and delivers him to the Medical Section. There, Grant meets CMDF's commandant, Lieutenant General Alan Carter USA (Edmund O'Brien). General Carter first shows him Benes, in a coma and on a litter. Then he introduces him to the surgeon, Dr. Peter Duval (Arthur Kennedy), and his assistant Cora Peterson (Raquel Welch), who will operate on Benes, and also to Dr. "Mike" Michaels (Donald Pleasence), who is somehow expected to watch Duval to make sure that Duval does not try to kill his patient while operating. Then Carter explains what CMDF means, and about the miniaturization technique that is at the heart of it all. The problem: the USA (and the USSR) can miniaturize any object, to any size, but cannot hold an object miniaturized for more than 60 minutes. Benes knows how to extend the time, and Grant is the one who brought Benes out when he sought to defect. Now Carter reveals why Grant is there: CMDF will reduce a small submarine to microscopic size, and deliver Duval, Miss Peterson, Michaels--and Grant--into Benes' body, to operate on Benes from the inside. Grant hates the idea. Worse yet, CMDF Medical Officer Col. Donald Reid (Arthur O'Connell) does not want a woman to go along on such a hazardous mission. Duval insists that he will have Cora or no one at his side. Grant also meets Captain Wilfrid Owens (William Redfield), designer and pilot of the submarine. The plan: reduce the submarine with all aboard and inject it into the left carotid artery. They will follow this to the site of the stroke, where Dr. Duval will use a hand-held laser to dissolve the clot. Then they travel back along the left internal jugular to the base of the neck, where they will be removed. The problem: if they stay in longer than 60 minutes, they will grow to a size that the immune system will notice, and Benes' own defenses will mobilize to destroy them. Grant barely has time to take in a briefing before Michaels leads him, Duval, Cora, and Owens to a "sterilization room." There they dress in white SCUBA wetsuits, with white overalls over this, all bearing the CMDF logo, and pass through a corridor that irradiates them gently with UVA to kill any germs on their bodies. As Carter and Reid make their preparations, the crew then climbs aboard their submarine (USS Proteus, U-91035) and make preparations for getting under way. Owens and Grant install a tiny reactor containing a microscopic radioactive particle, that will power the sub once they are shrunk. (Radioactive material cannot miniaturize.) Grant tests the ship's wireless, which will be his station. Owens tells Michaels how he will be able to read Michaels' details charts of Benes' circulatory and lymphatic systems. Cora mounts and tests the laser, while also teasing Grant about his still-obvious fear of being "shrunk." (Grant has, throughout, tried to cover his fear with bad jokes and worse innuendo, and doesn't fool Cora for one second.) Cora also reveals that she is a five-year veteran of CMDF and has worked with Duval all that time. Carter radios them to "prepare for miniaturization." So the crew pull out their seats, strap in, and settle in. Everything goes well, except for the time that Michaels, suffering an attack of claustrophobia, tries to get out through the topside hatch (after they are already submerged in an outsized hypodermic syringe), forcing Duval and Grant to restrain him and calm him down. (Duval and Grant have taken their first shot at working together, as they cooperate with Owens to accomplish the submersion.) With the second miniaturization step, the Proteus can now generate its own power. Eventually, the surgical team injects them into the carotid artery. And then the problems begin. At first the view is fascinating, But then Proteus drifts into a strong current, then into a whirlpool. It catches the crew unaware, so that though Michaels and Duval can regain their seats, Grant and Cora cannot. Michaels' shoulder belts pop, and Duval struggles to hold him in. Cora is dragged into a bulkhead, and only Grant's iron grip on her stops her from breaking her neck. Finally the Proteus comes out of the whirlpool--but now the blood cells surrounding them are blue, not the red they remembered. They realize (as do Carter and Reid, watching from outside) that Proteus has gone through an arterio-venous fistula from the carotid artery into the jugular vein. Now they are headed toward the superior vena cava, and will go through the heart--which will smash them. Michaels urges immediate removal, but the authorities, under Carter's leadership, have another idea: to put Benes into cardiac arrest and let Proteus swim through as fast as her drive can propel her. This they do, and Proteus dives into the right ventricle and goes out through the pulmonic valve, with three seconds to spare. Now they head into the lungs, where they observe oxygenation of the blue corpuscles that surround them. Just then, Proteus develops an air leak, which Owens stops, but only after Proteus has lost so much air that she cannot continue. Grant offers a solution: he will take the boat's snorkel and enter an alveolus to take the air that Benes breathes. Owens insists that everyone else aboard except himself join Grant in the dive, for safety reasons. As they put on their SCUBA gear, Grant discovers that the laser has broken loose and gotten knocked around. He firmly tells Duval and Cora to wait on testing the laser until after Grant finishes his snorkel operation. Grant succeeds in pulling in the air--but then his safety line snaps and he finds himself sucked into a bronchiole with Benes' next breathe-out. When Benes breathes in again, he luckily finds the original alveolus, after which he races to safety, with Duval strenuously pulling him back out into the bloodstream. Proteus gets back underway, heading into the pleural cavity. During this time, Cora disassembles the laser and discovers a smashed transistor and a broken trigger wire. Grant supplies replacements for both by cannibalizing the wireless and sending one last message, to the consternation of Carter and Reid. The transistor is of a good size, but the trigger wire is far too large--but Duval believes that he can scrape it down. Grant also takes time to discuss with Michaels a hard reality: someone has tried to sabotage the mission at least twice. Grant knows that Cora had indeed fastened the laser securely--so someone must have unfastened it, just as someone tampered with Grant's safety line. Michaels protests that he cannot think so ill of Duval, the logical suspect. Proteus enters the lymphatic system and passes through a lymph node. The boat blunders into several reticular fibers, and Owens warns that if they keep running into the seaweed-like fibers, they'll block the water jet intakes, and Proteus' engines will overheat. The crew also observe a stray bacterium, and antibodies attacking it and squeezing it to death. Grant is frustrated with the delay and the slow progress. Duval then suggests going to the inner ear--a very hazardous path, because the slightest noise will kill them, and they cannot warn the operating team. Grant expresses confidence that the surgical team, once they see where they are headed, will keep the required silence. Michaels is still dubious, but reluctantly agrees to navigate to Benes' left ear. Inside the ear, Owens must stop--the engines have overheated. Grant, Cora, and Michaels make another dive to pull the reticular fibers out of the intakes. Topside, a nurse (Shelby Grant) gets the idea of plugging Benes' ear with cotton--but then drops a pair of scissors to the floor. With the result that Proteus and her crew are badly shaken up. Cora gets the worst of it--she is carried into the Organ of Corti and finds herself trapped among the Cells of Hensen. She cries out for help, and Michaels and Grant race to her rescue--but Grant orders Michaels back aboard Proteus when he cannot go any further. Grant frees Cora from the hair cells, and they race back to the airlock--but as they wait for it to re-flood (after Michaels used it), antibodies attack Cora and fasten onto her. Grant hastily guides her into the airlock, closes the hatch--and then raps on the door when Cora makes plain that she simply cannot breathe. Michaels, Duval, and Owens open the airlock before it is fully evacuated, pull Cora out, and, with Grant's help, start pulling the antibody molecules off her body. Soon they start crystallizing and come off easily, so Cora is saved. Proteus gets back under way, passes through the middle ear, and then passes through the endolymphatic duct back into the vascular system. Now they penetrate into the brain and reach the clot. During that passage, Michaels and Duval argue about whether Duval, having repaired the laser, should test it. Duval insists on using the laser as-is, not wanting to strain it. Eventually they reach the clot. But with so little time remaining, Michaels wants Owens to take Proteus back out. But now Grant shuts down the power and insists that Duval and Cora go out and operate. Michaels strenously objects, but Grant firmly overrides him, saying that Duval simply does not fit the profile of a fanatic. Now Grant makes his near-fatal mistake: instead of remaining aboard, he goes out to see if he can "help" Duval and Cora. Duval manages to clear the clot, at least enough to get the blood flowing again and relieve the pressure on a key nerve. But aboard Proteus, Michaels knocks out Owens, and then restores power, takes the helm, and sends Proteus on a collision course for the nerve. Grant asks for the laser, and fires a wide-angle beam at Proteus, raking her port side and sending her away from the nerve and into several nearby dendrites. White corpuscles respond immediately, so Grant slips back aboard, through the tear in the hull, to rescue Michaels and Owens if he can. Owens is only now regaining consciousness, so Grant tells him to suit up as fast as he can. But when he tries to untangle Michaels from the wrecked helm station, a white cell settles over the helmsman's dome, breaks through, and suffocates Michaels. Grant and Owens then abandon ship, before the white corpuscles crush it. Duval keeps the white cells at bay long enough for Grant and Owens to escape, before the laser quits for good. Topside, Carter and Reid reluctantly order the removal of Proteus, because time has run out. Inside Benes' body, the four remaining crew swim as fast as they can along the optic nerve, toward Benes' left eye. Carter allows the attending surgeon to make preparations for a trephination procedure--and then deduces what the crew might do and stops the attending in mid-motion. Reid, too, realizes how they crew can still escape, and rushes down to the operating room and asks for a large magnifier. Through this, he looks into Benes' left eye, in time to make out four members of the crew swimming in Benes' tears. He calls for a microscope slide and uses it to lift out a teardrop, with the crew inside. Then he asks the staff to open the door, and as quickly as he dares, walks out into the miniaturization room and sets the slide gently down on the center hexagon. The crew then grows to full size, and the rest of the staff warmly greet them and assure them that the operation is a complete success. NOTE: The film, as it played, had a number of scientific inaccuracies and plot holes. Isaac Asimov, who wrote the novelization from the final shooting script, repaired these and at least tried to produce a scientifically consistent narrative. The key differences are: * The time limit on miniaturization is not a uniform sixty minutes. Instead, the rule is that energy of miniaturization (which is a function of the proportion of normal size to reduced size), when multiplied by duration of miniaturization, is equal to Planck's constant divided by two times pi. In simpler terms, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle governs the maximum time of miniaturization at any given size. Benes' secret is another set of variables that the original pioneering scientists overlooked. The sixty minutes that apply to this narrative are a special case of that model. * Grant's role and authority are broader than as depicted in the film version. In the novel, Grant, not Michaels, has the ultimate authority on policy decisions, and is another brain and pair of hands in an emergency. Cora, sensing right away that the CMDF brass put him on board because they suspect Duval of murderous intent, at first resents him bitterly, and then softens toward him and almost pleads with him to understand Duval's politics, that have caused CMDF to doubt him. Those politics are that the Two Sides in the Cold War ought to share scientific discoveries freely, without regard to strategic sensitivity. But Duval is not the saboteur, a thing Grant comes to deduce by process of elimination. * When Grant makes his first dive with the snorkel into Benes' lungs, Owens uses the on-board miniaturizer that Proteus carries, to reduce the air to a size compatible with Proteus and her crew in their shrunken state. Otherwise, Grant would have been trying to draw in oxygen molecules large enough to see. * When Grant's safety line parts, sending him up the bronchiolar tree, Duval suggests that Owens orient the Proteus to face the alveolar wall and shine the boat's headlight into it. That allows Grant to find the right alveolus again. Otherwise he would have been hopelessly lost. * As Carter and Reid watch Proteus enter the inner ear, they do not use their PA system to announce to the surgical team the hazard against making noise. Instead, Carter writes a note and sends an orderly to walk into the OR in his stockinged feet to hand it to the attending. When, later, he wants to suggest plugging Benes' ears, he sends another note the same way. (The nurse does not take that upon herself, but acts only when she gets Carter's second note. And when the scissors fall, she steps on them so that they won't rattle and thus risk more damage than they might already have caused.) * When Cora falls into the organ of Corti and finds herself wedged among the hair cells, the antibodies take time to "taste" her before they come swarming. Benes' body would never have had antibodies specific to her at the moment of contact. This is still a stretch, because the immune system is now known to take much longer than that to raise antibodies to anything, and through a process that is much more complex than that depicted in film or novel. * When the crew pull Cora back aboard, they only have to give one good tug at one clinging antibody molecule, before realizing that all the antibodies crystallize at once, and all they need do is brush them off. The air on board "hits" the antibodies and denatures them immediately. So the dramatic (and suggestive) grabbing procedure is not necessary. * When Duval and Cora make their dive to attack the clot with the laser, Cora wears her wetsuit inside out, in order not to present a recognizable target to any stray antibodies that might be lurking about. Benes might not have been "immunized" against her before, but he is now. * After clubbing Owens, Michaels, unaccountably, bundles him into a wet suit and drops him out the airlock. Perhaps Michaels takes no chances that Owens might come to himself and try to take his ship back. With the result that Grant's quick rescue operation becomes unnecessary. * After the Proteus crashes into the dendrites, Duval worries that the damage that Michaels has done might start a new clot. This apparently does not happen, but at least Asimov acknowledges the possibility, which the original script does not even talk about. * After the white corpuscles eat the Proteus, Grant knows that they can't just leave her in place. Even when crushed, Proteus will grow to a size to kill Benes. (Michaels also realizes this at the last instant of his life, which is why he bursts out laughing as the white corpuscle collapses the glass dome over his head.) So Grant takes out his dagger and slashes at the white cell to attract its attention and induce it to follow them out. Of course, that releases chemotaxins that bring a swarm of white cells, so the crew must swim for their lives to get out ahead of them. (Furthermore, the medical team topside do not stop tracking Proteus even as they prepare for the trephination procedure. When the monitoring techs realize that Proteus seems to be moving again, Carter stops the preparations. That's when Reid realizes that the crew are using an escape route he did not at first consider.) * The crew, swimming toward the eye, do not drop the laser. Instead, Cora tries to carry the laser out. When Cora inevitably starts flagging, Grant takes the laser and its power pack away from her so that she can swim unencumbered. * Finally, when Col. Reid extracts the crew, he does not try to walk with the slide into the miniaturizer room. Instead, he sets the slide on the operating-room floor where he stands and orders everyone out of the room, including Benes, whom the staff wheel out on his litter. When the crew re-magnify, General Carter takes a quick muster with his eyes and realizes, with a sickening feeling in his gut, that Michaels and the Proteus are both missing. Grant stops him and assures him that the pile of metal fragments next to the crew is what's left of both. The novel has a few more dramatic differences--offering a more detailed explanation of the science of miniaturization, and making more of the professional (or personal) relationships between General Carter and Colonel Reid, between Reid and Michaels, between Grant and Benes on the flight in, between Duval and Cora, and especially between Cora and Grant during and after the trip. (See above.) Grant also has a scene with Carter and Reid in which he acknowledges his mistake in going out on the dive with Duval and Cora, instead of remaining on board after he, in effect, had placed Michaels under arrest. The novel ends with an inspiring scene in which Grant, fully grown once more, pays a visit to Benes, who by now has regained consciousness and can even talk to him. BENES: And now I must remember what I came here to tell. It's a little fuzzy, but it's still all in there. GRANT: You'd be surprised to know what's in you, Professor.

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Brief Synopsis

Cast & crew, richard fleischer, stephen boyd, raquel welch, edmond o'brien, donald pleasence, arthur o'connell, photos & videos, technical specs.

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

In 1995 Czech scientist Jan Benes escapes from behind the Iron Curtain and is brought to the United States for interrogation. U. S. scientists are able to reduce objects, including people, to the size of bacteria, but the miniaturization can be sustained for only 60 minutes. The Czech scientist has learned the secret of prolonging the miniaturization; but before he reveals this knowledge, he sustains a severe brain injury which can be treated only from within his body. A plan is conceived whereby a crew of five will be placed in an atomic-powered submarine, miniaturized, injected into the scientist's bloodstream, and set on a course through the arteries to the brain. In addition to American secret agent Grant, the crew consists of Dr. Duval, the surgeon who will perform the operation; Cora Peterson, his assistant; Dr. Michaels, a circulatory expert; and Captain Owens, the sub's pilot. To save some of the 60 minutes, the group decides to stop the scientist's heart to allow the submarine to pass through the heart. Then Grant and the crew leave the sub, and by means of a snorkel tube attached to the patient's lungs, replenish their oxygen supply. As they near their destination, a nurse in the operating room drops a pair of surgical scissors, and the sound causes tremendous vibrations in the sub that hurl the crew from their positions. With only 6 minutes left, Dr. Michaels reveals himself to be an enemy agent intent on sabotaging the mission. The remaining crew members escape as white corpuscles envelop and digest both the submarine and Michaels. The operation is successfully performed by removing a blood clot with a laser beam, and the four survivors leave the scientist's body by swimming along the optic nerve and emerging through a tear duct.

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

William Redfield

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

Arthur Kennedy

Jean del val.

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

Shelby Grant

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

James Brolin

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fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

Hosted Intro

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

Best Art Direction

Best special effects, award nominations, best cinematography, best editing, best sound editing, best sound effects sound editing.

Fantastic Voyage

Yet all the suns that light the corridors of the universe shine dim before the blazing of a single thought - - Dr. Duval
- proclaiming in incandescent glory the myriad mind of Man... - Grant
Very poetic, gentlemen. Let me know when we pass the soul. - Dr. Michaels
The soul? The finite mind cannot comprehend infinity - and the soul, which comes from God, is infinite. - Dr. Duval
Yes, well, our time isn't. - Dr. Michaels
The medieval philosophers were right. Man is the center of the universe. We stand in the middle of infinity between outer and inner space, and there's no limit to either. - Dr. Peter Duval

Isaac Asimov was approached to write the novel from the script. He perused the script, and declared the script to be full of plot holes. Receiving permission to write the book the way he wanted, delays in filming and the speed at which he wrote saw the book appear before the film. Asimov fixed several plot holes in the book version, but this had no effect on the film (see the Goofs entry).

The scenes of crewmembers swimming outside the sub were shot on dry soundstages with the actors suspended from wires. There was some additional hazard involved because, to avoid reflections from the metal, the wires were washed in acid to roughen them, which made them more likely to break. To create the impression of swimming in a resisting medium, the scenes were shot at 50% greater speed than normal, then played back at normal speed.

As a college student, director Fleischer was a pre-med student for a time.

When filming the scene where the other crew members remove attacking antibodies from Ms. Peterson for the first time, director Fleischer allowed the actors to grab what they pleased. Gentlemen all, they specifically avoided removing them from Raquel Welch's breasts, with an end result that the director described as a "Las Vegas showgirl" effect. Fleischer pointed this out to the cast members -- and on the second try, the actors all reached for her breasts. Finally the director realized that he would have to choreograph who removed what from where, and the result is seen in the final cut.

Miscellaneous Notes

Released in United States July 1966

Released in United States Winter January 1, 1966

Released in USA on video.

CinemaScope

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Science on Screen

Fantastic Voyage

Fantastic Voyage

Release date.

  • Richard Fleischer
  • Stephen Boyd
  • Raquel Welch
  • Edmond O'Brien

Film Synopsis

A scientist is nearly assassinated. In order to save him, a submarine is shrunken to microscopic size and injected into his bloodstream with a small crew.

The brilliant scientist Jan Benes (Jean Del Val) develops a way to shrink humans and other objects for brief periods of time. Working in the Soviet Union, Benes escapes from behind the Iron Curtain with the help of CIA agent Grant (Stephen Boyd), but is attacked en route. In order to save the scientist, who has developed a blood clot in his brain, a team of Americans in a nuclear submarine is shrunk and injected into Benes's body. They have a finite period of time to fix the clot and get out before the miniaturization wears off.

Past Programs

Amherst Cinema, Amherst, MA

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Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Isaac asimov’s fantastic voyage from film to novel, thursday, march 25, 2021 mark r. kelly comments 4 comments.

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov First Edition: Houghton Mifflin, March 1966, Cover art Dale Hennesy (Book Club edition shown)

Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov Houghton Mifflin (239 pages, $3.95, Hardcover, March 1966) Cover art Dale Hennesy

Isaac Asimov’s early novels were published over a period of just eight years, from Pebble In the Sky in 1950 to The Naked Sun in 1957, with linked collections like I, Robot and the Foundation “novels” along the way. Some of his early short stories, published in magazines as early as 1939, weren’t collected into books until the 1960s, but for the most part Asimov had stopped writing science fiction by the late 1950s, perhaps because of the collapse of the SF magazine market, or perhaps because he’d discovered that writing nonfiction books was more lucrative and easier. As Asimov fans were painfully aware of at the time, a spell of some 15 years went by before he published his next original novel, The Gods Themselves in 1972, to great acclaim and awards recognition. (And then yet another decade went by before Asimov returned to regular novel writing, with Foundation’s Edge and a string of following novels derived from his Foundation and Robot universes.)

—Except for a book called Fantastic Voyage , in 1966, which was a novelization of a movie script. Such novelizations are by now a virtually extinct species, I think, but they were quite common in the 1970s especially where, once a movie left theaters, there was no way to experience it again except via proxy novel versions (and perhaps revival house movie theaters), especially of SF films. (Until the 1980s, when Video Cassette Recorders became widespread, and lots of old movies were issued on videotape, and novelizations became redundant.)

The year 1966 was early in the history of movie novelizations. Theodore Sturgeon had done Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea back in 1961, and by 1967 James Blish was doing narrative versions of Star Trek episodes, gathered into collections of 6 or 8 per book. There were other books associated with several TV shows in the mid-1960s, by Murray Leinster, Keith Laumer, and others, but these were not based on actual scripts and so are better described as “ties” or “tie-ins.” (If “novelizations” passed in the 1980s, there remain to this day hundreds of such “ties,” especially set in the Star Trek or Star Wars universes.)

Anyway, Isaac Asimov did the novelization of Fantastic Voyage , a big-budget film with spectacular special effects for its time. Why? The story is recounted in various places, but essentially his publisher asked, and talked him into it. Despite that Asimov had not written a novel in years. Despite that Asimov considered the job essentially hackwork. Nevertheless, Asimov agreed, on condition the book be published in hardcover (not just as an original paperback), and on the condition he could correct various scientific impossibilities in the film’s plot. He wrote the book quickly and so it was published some six months before the film opened, leading some to believe the film was based on Asimov’s novel. But it was the other way around.

Unlike my post about Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man , another story about miniature people, here I will explicitly revisit both the film and the book. Both to reconsider the idea of how miniature people makes sense or not, and to examine to what extent Asimov improved or otherwise changed the film’s narrative and rationale.

With that in mind, I’ll step through the film, and along the way comment on where Asimov expanded scenes, provided additional background, and offered scientific rationalization.

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov Bantam Books, October 1966, Cover art from movie poster (Scholastic Books edition shown)

Full disclosure: According to my records, the paperback edition of Asimov’s novel, shown here, was the first science fiction book I ever purchased. It’s an edition from Scholastic Book Services that provided, back in 1966, mail-orders from school classrooms, with delivery several weeks later. Editions for Scholastic at that time were identical to the publishers’ (paperback) editions, except that the price and publisher ID numbers were left off. I didn’t see the film until years later, in the VCR era.

To destroy a blood clot in the brain of a scientist whose mind holds the key to breaking a Cold War stalemate, a submarine with a crew of five is miniaturized to microscopic size and injected into the scientist’s body. As the sub travels to the brain to destroy the clot there with a laser, it experiences a series of accidents and attempted sabotages; the suspense is as much whether the mission will succeed (of course it will) but who of the five is the saboteur.

The film has spectacular special effects in its depictions of the interior of the human body, impressive even now, though the story is a suspense thriller with a one-crisis-a-minute plot. The Asimov novelization tries to rationalize the implausibility of miniaturization, expands on the mild sexual innuendo of the film (involving the one female crewman), adds analysis of the potential motivations of the saboteur, and finishes with a couple scenes confirming the success of the mission and about a potential romantic relationship.

Walkthrough of film and novelization, with [[ comments ]]

The film Fantastic Voyage ( Wikipedia ) was announced as “the most expensive science-fiction film ever made” (as of 1964 or 1965), with a budget of $5 million; its box office was $12 million. The film was notable not just for its special effects, but for the appearance, early in her career, of “international sex symbol” Raquel Welch ( Wikipedia ), and for its atonal score by Leonard Rosenman, with no music at all in the first four reels of the film, until the submarine enters the scientist’s body. Other stars in the film were Stephen Boyd, Edmond O’Brien, Donald Pleasance, Arthur O’Connell, and Arthur Kennedy, all familiar from other films of that era.

For this walk-through I’ll use Asimov’s chapter headings as dividers, but describe the film first, then Asimov’s version of the same scenes. A summary of the principal differences between film and book is at the end.

  • Movie: We see an airline in the night sky, descending toward landing.
  • General Alan Carter [Edmond O’Brian in the film] talks with Colonel Donald Reid [Arthur O’Connell]. Each wears a CMDF insignia. They fret about there being only 72 minutes before the plane lands. The agent in charge is Grant [Stephen Boyd]; the target is Benes . Both sides are evenly matched [[ this is very Cold War-ish, but only in terms of “Ourselves” and the “Others” ]]. Benes is bringing new knowledge to end the stalemate, if he makes it.
  • [[ Since I’d read the book first, I’d thought that Benes was pronounced “beans.” I was 11 years old! In fact it’s an eastern European name, pronounced in the film as “ben-esh.” ]]
  • Reid then visits Dr. Michaels [Donald Pleasance], of the medical division, who babbles about the complex circulatory system. He has heard of Benes’ research and is skeptical. Maybe lying, maybe mistaken. They discuss the surgeon Duval [Arthur Kennedy] as an arrogant son of a bitch. He’s a brain surgeon, always busy with his work. His assistant is Miss (Cora) Peterson [Raquel Welch], 25yo. Her specialty is laser work. They debate whether Benes’ work is for good, or if it would just increase the probability of world destruction.
  • [[ This is a running theme in Asimov, unexamined in the film. What is the greatest danger? For both sides, or only one side, having this miniaturization technology? ]]
  • Cpt William Owens [William Redfield] rides in a limousine flanked by motorcycle escorts, coming to the airfield. He chats with the secret service agent, Gonder. Owens is confident he will recognize Benes, rather than a double agent impersonating him.
  • With no dialogue (and no music), we see the plane land, then two big trucks with troops move in, along with motorcycles and three limos.
  • Out of the plane come two men: and old man, Benes; and the younger agent, Grant. Benes shakes hands with Grant in thanks, then rides away in a limo. Grant remains behind.
  • The cars and motorcycles drive through the dark city, a warehouse district. Suddenly an attack car emerges from an alley, hits the corner of the limo containing Benes, and then bursts into flames. Frantically, the agents drag Benes to another limo, while gunshots are heard as the agents attack the enemy.
  • Asimov: Benes greets Owens, recalling a drinking episode some years ago (which Grant sees as confirming Benes’ identity). And then the attack scene as in the film.
  • We see Benes, from above, unconscious in a hospital bed.
  • Then we get the film credits. Titles appear with teletype sounds. We hear electronic pings — very much like the electronic pings we heard in ‘60s TV shows like Lost in Space . There’s even a steady sound like that used for the Jupiter 2 flying in space, heard here as the Proteus shrinks. As in films of this era, full credits run at the beginning of the film. (As film credits became increasingly bloated, they’ve moved to the end of films, for decades now.) We never hear these electronic sounds again in the rest of the film.
  • Since I haven’t mentioned until now, the film credits four writers, most notably Jerome Bixby (author of SF novels and stories, such as “It’s a Good Life”), along with Otto Klement, David Duncan, and Harry Kleiner.
  • We fade to a city street at night. Finally we hear some dialogue: Grant is riding in a limo, accompanied by an agent, who apologizes for waking him up so early. In a deserted warehouse area, the limo stops, the other men in the car step out, Grant told to stay inside. The limo, on a hidden elevator pad, descends into the ground.
  • The elevator stops; a large door slides open, and we see a huge underground complex of well-lit corridors and people busily walking around. A man on a scooter appears; Grant gets on board, and they ride through the facility. The initials CMDF are everywhere. The scooter drives up ramps that parallel escalators. They pause at a security station, then Grant is dropped off at an office. General Carter greets him, takes him into an observation room, where they look down at Benes in a hospital bed on the level beneath them. Carter quickly explains that Benes has a brain injury and they have to operate. He turns on two monitors to introduce Duval and his assistant on one, Dr. Michaels on the other. Grant is needed for security purposes — Duval is suspected of being an enemy agent. Carter tells Grant to take orders only from Dr. Michaels. Grant remarks about Miss Peterson’s good looks
  • Follows the film closely, except that Grant is not told to follow Michaels’ orders; Asimov develops this differently in the next chapter.
  • Grant wonders what CMDF stands for. Consolidated Mobilization of Delinquent Females? Grant explains: Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces. They can reduce anything, put an army in a match box. Both sides have it, but it can’t be controlled. That was Benes has discovered.
  • Grant, flabbergasted, tries to refuse; he doesn’t want to be miniaturized!
  • They come to a briefing room, where Dr. Reid is objecting that Duval insists on taking his assistant along; a woman doesn’t belong on a trip like this! Duval says she volunteered. “So did every male technician in this unit!” Reid gives in, but disapproves.
  • Michaels proceeds with the briefing, turning on an overhead projector to display a crude diagram of Benes’ body on a screen. The injury can’t be reached from the outside, so a submarine will be reduced to the size of a microbe and injected into the body. Benes’ body will be slowed down, lowering heartbeats and respiration. No danger of turbulence, because they’re not going through the heart. Michael indicates their path, where the laser will be used, and then where the sub will head for removal. Communication will be by wireless, and since the sub is nuclear-powered, it can be tracked from outside. But they must be out in 60 minutes, when the miniaturization reverses; as they grow, there’s danger from white corpuscles and antibodies.
  • [[ I’ll note that during this scene, and many later scenes in the Control Booth, we see General Carter and one other character light up cigars, just as so many Asimov characters did in his early novels. ]]
  • Grant’s guess about CMDF is Consolidated Martian Dimwits and Fools.
  • Asimov attempts some rationalization of the miniaturization process, giving Michaels some long speeches about the miniaturization controversy some time back, how the idea was dismissed on theoretical grounds. There were two ideas for how to reduce size: push the individual atoms closer together; or discard a certain proportion of atoms. Neither is plausible, Michael explains; another technique was developed, and the idea went underground (thus the secret CMDF facility): “We are miniaturized, not as literal objects, but as images; as three-dimensional images manipulated from outside the universe of space-time.” He goes on about hyper-space. (p40)
  • Whereas the film states flatly that the miniaturization lasts only 60 minutes, Asimov explains that the length of miniaturization is proportional to its degree. To get as small as required for a mission inside the body, the miniaturization will begin to revert after 60 minutes. (Benes’ discovery is that he can beat this limitation, to maintain miniaturization indefinitely.)
  • The briefing room scenes proceed, with Grant twice trying to decline the mission, and being told he’s not a volunteer. Asimov states that the ship will be reduced to three micra, just under a ten-thousandth of an inch. And significantly, Grant is given the authority to make executive decisions. (Rather than merely keep an eye on Duval, who is not specifically suspected in the book.)
  • The crew walks out, crosses a concourse, passes through a big security door and into a computer room overlooking the operating room. [[ The TV monitors are ovoid and black and white, very primitive looking; meanwhile the computers flash patterns of meaningless white lights, like every other Hollywood computer of this era. ]]
  • The crew passes through a purple-lit sterilization corridor, then into a big room where the sub awaits. It’s white, horseshoe-shaped with an upright tail and a glass dome on top. They climb a ladder and enter from the top.
  • Inside is a chart table, a wireless station, and four seats beneath the captain’s perch under the dome.
  • Grant helps Cpt. Owens lower a heavy, battery-sized device into a niche in the floor — a “particle,” Owens explains, a microscopic bit of nuclear fuel that will be all they need to power the ship once miniaturized.
  • Owens explains how the sub was built as a research vessel to study the spawning of deep sea fish.
  • [[ And yet with all those windows and a glass dome, this sub doesn’t seem to be designed for deep-sea work. ]]
  • Grant then makes a remark about needing to “spawn” a message on the wireless. Miss Peterson, who has been determinedly business-like in attitude so far, notices the wordplay and smiles, just slightly.
  • So Grant sends out a message, and in the control room it’s read out: “Miss Peterson has smiled.”
  • Asimov omits the planting of a nuclear “particle.”
  • As they settle inside Michaels, who admits himself he likes to talk, speculates to Grant about who might be a secret agent — not Owens, because he would never sacrifice his ship. The least suspicious is him, Grant.
  • Asimov plays up the attempted innuendo between Grant and Cora; he keeps making remarks that allude to her looks, or just the fact that she’s a woman. She reproves him and tells him to treat her like any other crewman. But when she tests her laser and asks him to move his hand, he says “When near you hence-forward I shall be careful where I place my hand.” And she smiles, just a bit. So he sends the message, “Miss Peterson has smiled.”
  • Cpt. Owens shows Michaels a “repeater” in the cockpit, which will display whatever chart Michaels has out below.
  • Grant asks Miss Peterson about how she is around the house, if she can cook. She ignores him and tests the laser. [[ Asimov moved the laser test into the previous chapter. ]]
  • They prepare for miniaturization. They all strap in. Outside, the miniaturizer, a huge disk at ceiling height, is slid in above the sub.
  • From the Control Room, Reid orders Phase One. We hear whining. From above light glows onto the ship.
  • From inside, the crew sees the world through the windows expanding and growing farther away.
  • The sub becomes matchbox-sized on the red tile, the “Zero Module,” in the center of the room.
  • Much the same, though Asimov adds further interchanges between Grant and Cora, especially as she discusses her place in a man’s world. [[ Gradually as the novel proceeds, “Miss Peterson” becomes “Cora” both in the narrative and in Grant’s speech. ]]
  • While Michaels and others are nervous about all this, Duval blandly remarks that he has “the consolations of religion. I have confessed, and for me death is but a doorway.” The film has a scene or two in which Duval expresses near-religious awe, even presuming the existence of a creator, but Asimov makes Duval’s religious faith explicit.
  • Phase Two. A precision handling device is slowly wheeled in. Zero Module is elevated — the hexagonal tile slides up from the floor, to chest height. Carefully, a technician guides a fork at the end of an arm of the device underneath the ship, and lifts it. Zero Module descends, and in its place a huge glass cylinder rises. The handling device lowers the sub onto the surface of the water.
  • Inside, Owens orders Grant to open a couple valves, for the ship to submerge.
  • Outside, we see the tiny sub drifting downward in the glass cylinder.
  • Michaels has a panic attack, saying he can’t breathe, climbing up to the hatch and trying to open it. The others pull him down; he calms down, and apologizes.
  • Phase Three. Now the entire cylinder shrinks. Full reduction is achieved. The timer on the wall starts: 60 minutes and counting. Inside, the ship powers up.
  • Asimov refers to the handling device as a waldo, and alludes to a 1940s sf story without naming it.
  • Asimov has the sub crew perceive the people outside as slowly-moving, as if the subjective time at miniaturization may be longer than an hour. [[ Perhaps Asimov’s way to make more plausible how many events the crew endures in a single hour. ]]
  • Phase Four. Zero Module is elevated again; the handler moves in, and in two steps, a plunger and then a needle are attached to the ends (by nurses wearing white uniforms with caps).
  • The handler moves over to Benes, whose bald head is now lined in a grid, and who has a big X marked on his throat. An array of tiny radar antennas is positioned around his head.
  • Asimov has the crew recognize that the slight vibrations they feel are Brownian motion.
  • Cora is optimistic they can wrap this up in 15 minutes, then it doesn’t matter (if the ship suffers from the vibrations). Michaels angrily explains that it *does* matter, because if they wreck the ship before being extracted from Benes, he would still be killed by the expanding debris. [[ This is Asimov’s first allusion to they key flaw of the film, which Asimov takes pains to correct. ]]
  • Grant accepts Owens’ assurance that the ship will survive 60 minutes of such vibrations. So they will proceed. [[ This is Grant’s first executive decision, given the role Asimov assigns him. ]]
  • We see the ship sliding down through the water, at a downward angle, with a gushing sound – and then they’re out, into relatively calm waters, inside the body.
  • [[ —And here is where the film’s music begins. It’s by Leonard Rosenman (composer of many films from East of Eden to Star Trek IV ), and it’s atonal, though not 12-tone (there’s a repeated four-note motif in almost every scene). It’s appropriately otherworldly for a science fiction film about a place no one has ever seen before. There’s an 11-minute suite of the score at YouTube here , complete with electronic pings and teletype noises. (The first instance of the four-note motif is at 1:10)
  • (YouTube also has this 17-minute documentary about the making of the film here , which reveals where those various electronic sounds came from: created by a sound editor named Ralph Hickey for a 1957 Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn film called Desk Set , as sounds an advanced computer would make.) ]]
  • The ship’s crew looks out at huge red and blue blobs floating around them—corpuscles. Duval gets philosophical: “…man is the center of the universe. We stand in the middle of infinity between outer and inner space.” He sees something he doesn’t recognize — maybe a protein? — and wants to stop for a sample, but they have no time.
  • They expect a branch in the artery in two minutes, but Cpt. Owens finds himself struggling against some kind of current. The ship plunges into a whirlpool. The crew straps in, but are pressed outward by centrifugal force.
  • Abruptly, the sub emerges through an arterial wall into calm. But where are they?
  • In the book Duval calls the view “God’s handiwork.”
  • At the end they realize they’ve passed through an arterio-venous fistula, a small connection between artery and vein, perhaps caused by the initial accident Benes was in.
  • Michaels is the expert on Benes’ circulatory system; shouldn’t he have known this fistula was there? Or perhaps it was too small to be noticed?
  • Control realizes Proteus is off course, in the jugular vein.
  • In the sub, Michaels explains about the fistula. They’re headed for the heart, and they can’t go through it. Michaels wants to call off the mission, at 51 minutes. In Control, the General insists they keep going, and asks about stopping the heart. How long can it be stopped? And how long for Proteus to get through? 60 seconds, and 57 seconds respectively. He orders the surgical team to prepare for cardiac shock.
  • As the sub approaches the heart, the crew hears heartbeats, and feels the ship jerking with each one. As they reach the valve — a huge three-sided thing — Owens hits the gas and they enter the abruptly quiet heart.
  • Outside the General watches his stopwatch. Inside the sub glides through the calm, through tendrils, spotting the semi-lunar valve, and just as the heart starts again, is whisked into the pulmonary artery.
  • No significant difference.
  • So now the sub is headed toward the lungs. They enter a capillary, and watch how corpuscles release CO2 in return for oxygen; refueling, and changing color.
  • Duval: “One of the miracles of the universe.” Michaels: “Just an exchange of gases; the end product of 500 million years of evolution.” Duval: “You can’t believe that all that is accidental, that there is a creative intelligence at work?”
  • But then an alarm sounds. The air pressure is dropping, due to a short that Owens quickly fixes. But they’ve lost too much air to go on. Grant observes they’re right along the lung, plenty of air there. Are there snorkels on board? Yes. Michaels, always ready to abandon the mission, reluctantly agrees to Grant’s plan.
  • Then Grant notices the laser has half fallen out of its cradle. How did that happen? Cora is sure she strapped it down.
  • But for now the four of them put on suits to go outside. The camera lingers on Raquel Welch as she partially disrobes.
  • Outside, the ship lowers legs to sit on the capillary wall.
  • In Control, they wonder why the sub has stopped again.
  • In the capillary, two of the crew, and then another two, exit the bottom of the sub.
  • Duval: “Look at the God-given wonder of it.” And so on, the exchange a bit expanded, the time period changed to 3 billion years.
  • Asimov realizes there’s a problem with miniature people breathing un-miniaturized air. (Which is to say, the movie implicitly presumes all the atoms and molecules are the same size and can interact with each other.) Asimov imagines, rather implausibly, that the sub has a small miniaturizer on board, and the crew jury-rigs a system of tubes to get full-sized air through it before refilling the sub’s tank.
  • Outside the sub, in snorkeling gear, Grant pulls on a big rubber hose attached to the sub. They see the lung through a thin wall, with bits of rock (dust).
  • Duval ties Grant’s lifeline to the sub; we see him doing it.
  • Grant pushes through the wall into the lung, pulling the hose. Sound of wind. In the sub, the pressure meter rises until full. In the lung, Grant slips and is blown away from the ledge where he pushed in. He tumbles through the air, lands, climbs back up, and pushes through.
  • The sub sails on (this scene as on the cover of the hardcover, top).
  • Essentially the same.
  • Back in the sub, Cora finds a broken trigger wire in the laser. End of laser. Michaels, yet again, suggests ending the mission immediately.
  • But Grant has an idea: he can get a replacement wire from the wireless. Michaels of course objects; they’ll be cut off from the outside world! The others calm him down, and a last message is sent to Control: “Cannibalizing wireless to repair laser.”
  • Cora holds up the replacement wire. It’s too thick. Duval, the surgeon, will try scraping it down to size.
  • This location or term wasn’t mentioned in the movie; Asimov has the crew mention they can move forward through the pleural lining.
  • As Duval and Cora work to repair the laser, Michaels wonders to Grant if Cora herself sabotaged the laser. And what about the lifeline? Did Duval try getting rid of him, Grant, for paying attention to Cora? Michaels admits he might have known about the fistula. Clues here seem to point everywhere.
  • The sub sails on. Grant confides to Michael: there have been attempts at sabotage. Could it be Duval?
  • The sub is going through the lymphatic system, which looks like a tunnel of netting, with fibers draping over the ship, like seaweed. They observe antibodies destroying the invaders.
  • [[ Of all the otherworldly landscapes and objects the film imagines as the inside of the human body, the antibodies are especially striking effects: little bundles of fibers that skitter quickly through the water, clinging and shaping themselves to the perceived intruder. ]]
  • Is there another route, to avoid these fibers? Duval suggests the inner ear. Michaels warns it’s dangerous — any noise from the outside world would be a disaster for the sub. Grant points out, they’re tracking the sub, they’ll see where we’re going and will understand.
  • Asimov has Cora explain what the lymph system does, what antibodies do. The fibers cause the engines to overheat. They watch as antibodies attack a bacterium and squeeze it to death. They acknowledge the risks of going through the ear, but figure those outside will understand. Grant specifically makes the decision to go ahead.

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov Bantam Books, October 1966, Back cover image from film (Scholastic Books edition shown)

  • In Control, realizing where the Proteus is heading, Reid makes an announcement (over a loudspeaker) that everyone is to remain completely silent.
  • The sub heads along a blue-green tunnel, settling onto a ledge. The vents are clogged with puffy seaweed. Grant, and then Michaels and Cora, suit up to go outside and pull the fibers off the ship. Duval stays inside to repair the laser. [[ The sub on the ledge as three pull off fibers is shown on the back cover of the paperback edition, above. ]]
  • In Control, the frazzled general, drinking cup after cup of coffee, reaches out to crush an ant, hesitates, and withdraws.
  • As the surgical team stands silently, one man’s forehead twitches with sweat. A nurse, seeing this, reaches out for a towel behind her, and as she pulls it off the table, knocks a pair of scissors onto the floor.
  • In the ear, chaos ensues, as the sounds echoes through the ear, sending the sub crew tumbling. [[ But why for so long? The sound was sharp but not reverberating. ]] Cora, tossed away, gets caught in some kind of fibers (the Cells of Henson, Michaels later mentions), which in turn attracts antibodies. Grant pulls her out, but the antibodies catch up to them, clinging to Cora. The two climb inside the sub, Cora gasping that she can’t breathe. They open the airlock prematurely; water pours onto the deck, as three of the men struggle to pull the antibodies off her. And discover they quickly crystalize, and snap into shards.
  • At the end of this last scene, Asimov has Cora burst into tears.
  • Asimov has Reid hand-write a warning to be completely quiet, which is carried around to each member of the surgical crew.
  • Later, when Carter and Reid realize the sub has stopped, they have a nurse put cotton in Benes’ ears.
  • Asimov omits the ant scene.
  • Here, as in some earlier scenes, the panic with the antibodies brings to Grant phrases from his college years: peptide chains, Van der Waals forces.
  • In Control, the General notes 12 minutes left. He runs out of sugar.
  • Inside, the sub glides through green light; they realize it’s light from the eardrum.
  • Duval has repaired the laser and Michael argues that it must be tested. Duval refuses; it will or will not work, he says, and perhaps only for a short period, and he doesn’t want to waste any of its capacity on a test.
  • They enter the brain: an enormous lacework with flashes of light moving up and down.
  • Duval is moved to quote: “Yet all the suns that light the corridors of the universe shine…”
  • A quote which Grant finishes.
  • Duval goes on about the soul and the infinite and God.
  • A Google search suggests that the lines of verse in the film were made-up. Asimov substitutes lines from Wordsworth: “Where the statue stood of Newton with his prism and silent face…” Which Duval begins and Grant, belying his military background, completes.
  • The sub crew sees the blood clot ahead — a huge dark red mass amid the latticework of the brain. Michaels as usual warns they don’t have time; they have only 6 minutes left, and it takes 2 minutes to reach the removal point. Michaels insists on abandoning the mission, heading for the removal point at once. Cpt. Owns says, OK, since Michaels is nominally in charge. But Grant, in response, flips switches on a control panel to depower the sub, and directs Duval to get his laser.
  • Michaels and Grant argue as Duval and Cora exit.
  • Duval begins firing the laser at the clot. Pieces of the clot, like moldy cloth, fall away.
  • Inside the sub, Michaels tells Cpt. Owens that there’s something wrong with the escape hatch. Owens comes down to investigate, and as he leans over, Michaels picks up a wrench and clubs Owens on the head. (At last, Michaels is revealed as the saboteur.)
  • Michaels quickly turns on power, climbs into the control dome, and pilots the sub toward the clot.
  • Duval, Cora, and Grant have seen the clot is sufficiently destroyed. Cora notices the sub is moving quickly toward them. Grant grabs the laser and fires it at the sub, cutting a swath through its hull that sends water flooding the inside. The sub lurches and crashes into a bundle of fibers. White corpuscles appear, converging on it. Can Michaels and Owens be saved? If not they’ll be ingested.
  • Grant climbs into the wrecked sub, finds Owens conscious, and Michaels trapped in the dome by machinery trapping his hands. Overhead, a white corpuscle, a huge mass of white foam, penetrates the dome and engulfs Michaels’ head, as he screams. Grant and Owens escape.
  • As the ship arrives at the clot, Michaels insists Duval is the enemy agent; Grant fires back that he, Michaels, is the enemy agent.
  • Owens escapes the sub by himself — actually Michaels suits him up, allowing him to escape — and joins the others. Michaels calls the others from the sub, ranting about saving mankind (from the danger of both sides having controllable miniaturization technology), before being taken out by the laser.
  • The ship crashes and the survivors realize they have to leave now. What’s the quickest way? Out through the eye.
  • The survivors swim to the corner of the eye. The sub has been engulfed by the white corpuscle.
  • In Control, time is up, the sub crew has to be removed. The order comes: trepanation. The radar rack is removed, and a surgical team gathers around Benes’ head.
  • And then the general stops them. He thinks the ship may already be destroyed, and the crew is on their way to the nearest exit point, the eye.
  • Reid walks down to the operating room, leans over Benes, and looks into his eye. He sees a spot. He asks for a glass slide, pulls a teardrop with that spot onto the slide, walks it over to the red hexagon in the miniaturization room, sets it down, stands back. And the four survivors grow from nothingness to full size as everyone watches.
  • [[ The music here becomes more tonal, complete with chimes. ]]
  • As the crew reaches full-sized, Reid smiles and nods to them. They shake hands. In the control room, all the staff sitting at those computer consoles get up and rush down to the operating floor, forming a crowd, welcoming the crew back. Then end.
  • [[ Thus, we presume Benes is OK and the mission was a success, but we’re not told or shown so. ]]
  • At this point Asimov addresses the problem of the wrecked sub, and the dead Michaels, a problem the film ignored. They will deminiaturize too, or their fragments will, and would kill Benes. So Asimov has Grant attract the attention of the white cell that engulfed the ship by stabbing it with a knife, and so lures it to follow him as he swims with the others toward the eye.
  • As they swim, and start de-miniaturizing, they see their surroundings getting small; they are getting bigger. They escape through a duct, the white cell following.
  • The survivors then expand to full size next to a heap of metal fragments. Where’s Michaels? Grant explains: “Somewhere in [the wreckage] you’ll find whatever’s left of Michaels. Maybe just an organic jelly with some fragments of bones.”
  • And then, past where the movie ends, Asimov provides some concluding, confirmational scenes.
  • Grant wakes after sleeping 15 hours. He speaks with Grant and Reid, discussing how Michaels wasn’t a story-book villain; he was sincere in his way, worried about the spread of dangerous technology. There have been people like this since the atomic bomb; yet his mission was futile because Benes’ secret would have been discovered eventually by someone else.
  • Grant explains how he came to suspect Michaels. How each apparent accident wouldn’t have been sabotage by the obvious suspect. Michaels always argued for the end of the mission after each accident. His initial fear gave way to calm, since he figured the mission would fail; then he got angry as each accident was overcome. [[ This is the kind of analysis typical of most Asimov novels. ]]
  • Grant decides to find Cora. She is just leaving Duval’s office. Grant appears. Still “Cora”? And he’ll be Charles. May they admire each other? Of course.
  • They visit Benes, eyes open. He remembers what he came here to say. His secret is secure.
  • And so Grant and Cora depart, “hand in hand, into a world that suddenly seemed to hold no terrors for them, but only the prospect of great joy.”

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain by Isaac Asimov Doubleday, September 1987, Jacket illustration Ron Miller

To summarize film and book and the changes Asimov made:

  • A sub enters a human body to repair a clot in the brain, and suffers one calamity after another, some perhaps accidents, some perhaps due to the work of a saboteur or double agent. But the mission to destroy the clot succeeds.
  • Asimov addresses the problem of how miniaturization would work, dismisses two obvious methods, and settles on familiar sfnal double-talk about hyperspace. (Asimov wrote a later novel, Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brian , not a sequel to the movie or his novelization of it, but his own independent treatment of the idea. But it’s twice as long as the novelization here, and I haven’t checked to see what its miniaturization rationale is.)
  • Asimov adds scenes at the beginning (to introduce characters) and end (to confirm the success of the mission), but otherwise follows the movie’s plot very closely.
  • Asimov ramps up Grant’s sexual innuendo with Cora, to a point that would be unacceptable today; but as the story goes on, their relationship becomes more respectful, and by the end of the book is the implication of a serious relationship.
  • And Asimov considers the motives of the saboteur: not a cartoon villain, but whose motives are sincere, if misguided.
  • Finally, despite the one-crisis-a-minute plotting, both film and novel remain impressive as an imaginative journey, and for the film’s visualizations of the interior of the human body (which much of the time looks like paintings by Paul Lehr).

Mark R. Kelly’s last review for us was of Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man . Mark wrote short fiction reviews for Locus Magazine from 1987 to 2001, and is the founder of the Locus Online website, for which he won a Hugo Award in 2002. He established the Science Fiction Awards Database at sfadb.com . He is a retired aerospace software engineer who lived for decades in Southern California before moving to the Bay Area in 2015. Find more of his thoughts at Views from Crestmont Drive , which has this index of Black Gate reviews posted so far.

guest

I also read that fairly early in my SF reading career. I still have never seen the movie.

Too bad you didn’t have Seinfeld to give a hint to the pronunciation of Benes’ name! (Or, in my latter day case, Cardinals’ pitchers Andy and Alan Benes.) Of course those Americanized names are pronounced BEN-uhs, with an “S” sound, not “Sh”.

I don’t know when movie novelizations became very popular, but I have novelized editions of plays (from the first decade of the 20th Century), and of movie serials (or series of shorts) from 1915 or so. I think the earliest feature film novelization can be traced to the very early ’20s. I do think they became far more popular by the ’60s.

Mark R. Kelly

Point taken — Paul Di Filippo emailed me about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoplay_edition .

James Enge

Another great, detailed review! A real trip down memory lane for me, too: when sf films were thin on the ground, it was an event any time this was broadcast on TV. And that was even before I was old enough to realize why Raquel Welch was a big deal.

I had a few novelizations on my regular reread list as a kid, and this was one of them, partly because I was an obsessive Asimov fan. But I think Asimov was actually good at capturing the dry, worldly tone of spy novels and mysteries. His plain, matter-of-fact style is the prose equivalent of Jack Webb’s radio voice.

I remember thinking that this book almost seemed like a prequel to Asimov’s “Let’s Get Together”, a robot espionage story set in a future where the Cold War never ended. Although I haven’t read either for a long time.

thingmaker

About the history of novelizations… There was one by Achmed Abdullah of the 1924 Thief of Bagdad. King Kong got one in 1933 and I know of one to The Creature From the Black Lagoon in 1954, so I’m guessing there were probably quite a few early ones.

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Fantastic Voyage (TV series)

Fantastic Voyage is an American animated science fiction TV series based on the famous 1966 film directed by Richard Fleischer . [1] The series consists of 17 half-hour episodes, airing Saturday mornings on ABC-TV from September 14, 1968, through January 4, 1969, then rebroadcast the following fall season. The series was produced by Filmation Associates in association with 20th Century Fox Television . A Fantastic Voyage comic book, based on the series, was published by Gold Key and lasted two issues. [2]

Opening narration

Voyager model, external links.

The show was later broadcast in reruns on the Sci Fi Channel 's Cartoon Quest , from 1992 to 1996. [3]

There are currently no plans to release the series on DVD and/or Blu-ray Disc in Region 1 from 20th Century Home Entertainment , although most of the series is available for viewing on YouTube , and the show was released on DVD in the United Kingdom years previously.

Fantastic Voyage is the story of the C.M.D.F. (Combined Miniature Defense Force), a secret United States government organization that possessed the ability to reduce people to microscopic size. [4]

The main characters were Commander Jonathan Kidd; biologist Erica Lane; scientist Busby Birdwell; and a "master of mysterious powers" known only as Guru. The team was reduced in size for its missions, each miniaturization period having a time limit of 12 hours, and it traveled around in a microscopic flying submarine, the Voyager, doing battle against the unseen, unsuspecting enemies of the free world, both criminal and germinal matter. The missions of the team were given out and supervised by Professor Carter, in charge of the miniaturization process, and a character usually referred to as "the Chief" (presumably the overall leader of the CMDF), who was always seen only in shadow. Occasionally, the four were accompanied by people who did not work for CMDF, but who Professor Carter and The Chief felt would be helpful. More often than not, these people were villains. The series featured character voices provided by Marvin Miller , Jane Webb , and Ted Knight . The producers were Lou Scheimer and Norm Prescott ; the director was Hal Sutherland . The music was provided by Gordon Zahler (of Plan 9 From Outer Space infamy).

Changes from the film, aside from the ship's crew, included the duration of miniaturization (one hour in the film, 12 in the cartoon) and the meaning of the acronym CMDF from "Combined Miniaturized Deterrent Force" to "Combined Miniature Defense Force".

Headquarters: CMDF--Combined Miniature Defense Force. Project: Fantastic Voyage. Process: Miniaturization. Authority: Top Secret, highest clearance. Team: Jonathan Kidd, Commander. Guru, master of mysterious powers. Erica Lane, doctor, biologist. Busby Birdwell, scientist, inventor, builder of the Voyager . Mission: In their miniaturized form, to combat the unseen, unsuspected enemies of freedom. Time limit: Twelve hours.

While the series was in production, the Aurora Model Company developed a plastic model of the Voyager , releasing it only months before the series' cancellation was announced. Due to the short run of the show, this kit received only one press run, and as a result, it is one of the rarest kits to find in the Aurora line. A contributing factor to this scarcity is that most of the kits were bought for use as toys (by fans of the show) rather than as static display or collectors's items; thus they were lost, broken or disposed of long before they became "collectables."

Unbuilt, in-box kits have been sold on eBay for prices between US$300 and US$700. Assembled and partially assembled models in varied conditions from "acceptable" to "well-worn" have been sold for over $100, depending on their condition.

Polar Lights, a company which owned the rights to re-produce the kit, passed on re-releasing the subject. Company director Dave Metzner stated that they had to produce much more in-demand subjects in order to be able to afford even considering the production of such niche products.

However, Moebius Models retooled from an original kit, and went into production on a reproduction Voyager kit, including the original distinctive delta-shaped stand used for Aurora aircraft models.

The complete series was released, as a 3-disc DVD set, in the United Kingdom by Revelation Films on November 21, 2011.

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  • ↑ Wells, John (2014). American Comic Book Chronicles: 1965-1969 . TwoMorrows Publishing. p.   235. ISBN   978-1605490557 .
  • ↑ Erickson, Hal (2005). Television Cartoon Shows: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, 1949 Through 2003 (2nd   ed.). McFarland & Co. pp.   321–322. ISBN   978-1476665993 .
  • ↑ Woolery, George W. (1983). Children's Television: The First Thirty-Five Years, 1946-1981 . Scarecrow Press. pp.   97 –98. ISBN   0-8108-1557-5 . Retrieved 14 March 2020 .

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Fantastic Voyage Reviews

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

With such titles as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes, the 1960s proved to be a particularly rich decade for science fiction cinema, and Fantastic Voyage stands as one of the period's most imaginative efforts.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 23, 2023

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

…even if the process work is poor by today’s standards, this voyage still seems fantastic today…

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 9, 2023

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

The science is shaky at best but the imaginative spectacle is marvelous: scuba diving surgeons battle white blood cells, tap the lungs to replenish the oxygen supply, and shoot the aorta like daredevil surfers.

Full Review | Mar 4, 2023

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

A nonstop adventure of sizable proportions.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Aug 24, 2020

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

Technically, the film is only too obviously under all kinds of strain, as if trying to live up to a budget which it never wanted in the first place.

Full Review | Apr 2, 2020

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

Ignoring the painfully slow first third, the rest of the film is an enjoyable, basic sci-fi adventure. It won't wow you, but it will entertain you.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 7, 2019

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

"Fantastic Voyage" is a fun adventure with some incredible sets representing the inside of the human body. What it lacks in reality is made up by beauty and skill.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Oct 14, 2013

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

Not be as suspenseful as it once was, because we've seen many shots of the body's interior and we no longer have the undercurrents of the Cold War that made life itself an edge-of-the-seat affair. But it's still a fun sci-fi excursion.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Oct 11, 2013

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

Despite the film being nearly 50 years old, it's still pretty impressive what they were able to accomplish using practical photography. Sure it's campy, but it's the kitschy design that makes it so much fun to watch.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 7, 2013

That it carries the viewer along is thanks largely to its kitsch charm, its energetic pace and the stunning sets designed by Harper Goff.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 19, 2013

Half planetarium, half lava lamp

Full Review | Feb 6, 2010

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

Fascinating still, but suffers from lack of more sophisticated special effects. Still...imagine Raquel Welch moving around inside.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 14, 2009

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

The lavish production, boasting some brilliant special effects and superior creative efforts, is an entertaining, enlightening excursion through inner space -- the body of a man.

Full Review | Jun 4, 2007

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

This special effects extravaganza from 1966 has proved surprisingly enduring, despite a technical quality crude by contemporary standards; perhaps it's the screwball poetry of the plot.

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

...our own human interior was revealed, like a Jacques Cousteau travelogue, in screen-filling vistas of surreal canals and chambers filled with floating psychedelia and the amorphous Jell-O colors of a Jimi Hendrix concert.

Full Review | Jun 3, 2007

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 30, 2005

Well directed science fiction

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 13, 2005

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 1, 2005

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 21, 2005

fantastic voyage movie wikipedia

All I can tell you is it is quite a trip.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 9, 2005

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Fantastic Voyage

Entry updated 10 November 2023. Tagged: Film, TV.

pic

1. Film ( 1966 ). Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Richard Fleischer. Written by Harry Kleiner, based on a story by Otto Clement and J Lewis (i.e., Jerome) Bixby adapted by David Duncan . Cast includes Stephen Boyd, Edmund O'Brien, Donald Pleasence and Raquel Welch. 100 minutes. Colour.

A submarine carrying a crew of medical experts – including a double-agent saboteur (Pleasence) – is Miniaturized by Ray treatment at the US Combined Miniaturized Deterrent Forces facility and injected into the bloodstream of an important Scientist (a Soviet defector in the Cold War context) in order to remove by laser surgery a blood-clot from his brain. Owing to various accidents they deviate from the intended course, leading to such desperate expedients as the temporary stopping of the patient's heart to allow a turbulence-free passage for the tiny submarine, and a side-trip to the lungs for additional oxygen supplies. Despite sabotage and other obstacles the blood clot is successfully lasered, only for the submarine to be attacked and destroyed by the immune system's implacable white blood cells. In the finale – a swimming race to escape before the team reverts to full size while still inside the body – they exit via a tear duct with only seconds to spare. The special effects by L B Abbott, Art Cruickshank and Emil Kosa Jr are impressive, as are the sets – duplicating in giant size various organs of the body, such as the heart, lungs and brain – designed by art director Dale Hennesy with spectacular histological surrealism. This vivid spectacle, however, does not compensate for the ham acting, the irrelevance of the lingered-on breasts of surgical assistant Cora Peterson (Welch), and the sometimes puerile melodrama.

The novelization was Fantastic Voyage ( 1966 ) by Isaac Asimov , who doggedly repaired such filmic lapses as the abandoning of the wrecked submarine (and saboteur) within the patient's body where it would of course expand disastrously to full size. A film using a very similar theme is Joe Dante 's Innerspace ( 1987 ). [PN/JB/DRL]

2. US animated tv series ( 1968-1970 ). Filmation Associates with 20th Century Fox Television for the ABC-TV network. Produced by Loc Scheimer and Norm Prescott. Directed by Hal Sutherland and Anatole Kirsanoff. Writers include Jerome Bixby , Eric Blair, David Melmuth, and Ken Sobol . Cast includes Ted Knight, Marvin Miller and Jane Webb. Narrator: Knight. 17 30-minute episodes. Colour.

A super-secret agency, the Combined Miniature Defence Force (CMDF), oversees the missions of the Voyager , a winged submarine, whose crew faces various threats when they and their ship are miniaturized to microscopic level in twelve-hour stints (see Great and Small ). Led by Commander Jonathan Kidd (Knight), the crew includes the submarine's designer Bushy Birdwell (Miller), Dr Erica Lane (Webb), and Guru (also Miller) a Tibetan wizard with mild powers of Telekinesis . The Voyager faces various threats including espionage from hostile foreign powers, and unfriendly Aliens as well; missions inside the human body are rare.

More a spin-off from Fantastic Voyage ( 1 above) than a sequel, the series was reportedly originally meant to be a live-action programme developed by teleplay authors William Read Woodfield and Allan Balter. This idea was scrapped, presumably due to cost considerations; 20th Century Fox settled instead for an animated series slanted towards younger audiences, with an entirely new crew. Tie merchandise was limited to a short-run plastic model kit from Aurora Model Company produced near the series' conclusion. Fantastic Voyage was one of the first science fiction offerings from Filmation Associates, which – with Hanna-Barbera , and Sid and Marty Krofft Productions – would dominate US juvenile programming in both live-action and animated television throughout the 1970s. [GSt]

  • Internet Movie Database – 1966 film
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Den of Geek

Why Hasn’t Fantastic Voyage Been Remade Yet?

As we mourn the passing of ‘60s icon Raquel Welch, we ponder why her breakthrough sci-fi classic, Fantastic Voyage, has not received a full-on upgrade.

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Fantastic Voyage

When 1960s and ‘70s icon Raquel Welch died last week at the age of 82 , much of the media focus was on her (well-deserved) status as one of the most memorable and gorgeous sex symbols in movie history. A lot of the coverage, in fact, noted that the Chicago native’s substantial talents as an actress, singer, and dancer (she appeared in 30 films, numerous TV series, and hosted a handful of her own variety specials), were overshadowed by her status as one of the era’s premiere pinups.

While she may be best remembered for her turn as a skimpily-clad cavewoman in 1966’s One Million Years B.C. , her breakout role came earlier that year in the 20th Century Fox sci-fi spectacle Fantastic Voyage . The film was Welch’s fourth, but the first in which she had a lead role. She played Cora Peterson, one of five members of a medical team who are miniaturized, along with a small submarine, and injected into the body of a defecting Soviet scientist in order to remove a clot from his brain and save his life.

With only 60 minutes in which to work, since that is when the miniaturization process will subside and they’ll revert to full size, the team makes its way via the patient’s bloodstream through various marquee organs—the heart, the lungs, the ear—each with their own dangers and challenges. Meanwhile the crew’s security officer (Stephen Boyd) begins to suspect that someone on board is a saboteur, installed on the mission by the enemy government to kill him from the inside.

Welch doesn’t have a lot of dialogue in the movie, but for the era, she’s no wallflower either. Her character is a capable technician charged with assisting the surgeon who’s going to perform the procedure. Welch and the rest of the cast, which also includes reliable character actors like Boyd ( Ben-Hur ), Donald Pleasance ( Halloween ), and Edmond O’Brian ( Seven Days in May ), all acquit themselves reasonably well considering that they spend most of the movie either on wires or in the cramped submarine set.

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Like many movies of its time, Fantastic Voyage is best remembered for its audacious (if scientifically ludicrous) premise and its technical presentation of the inner workings of the human body, which were recreated through the use of large sets , animation, and rear projection. The 57-year-old movie looks shakier today in visual terms—although one has to wonder how far we’ve really come from matte images to, say, the Volume—but watching it begs the question: Why hasn’t this been remade?

A Sci-Fi Spectacle of Its Time

Directed by Richard Fleischer, whose other sci-fi outings included the Disney submarine classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and the seminal Charlton Heston overpopulation thriller Soylent Green (1973), Fantastic Voyage was conceived by writers Otto Clement and Jerome Bixby (the latter wrote the classic “It’s a Good Life” episode of The Twilight Zone and penned two of the original Star Trek ’s most famous segments , “Mirror, Mirror” and “Day of the Dove”).

The story was adapted by David Duncan ( The Time Machine ) and the final screenplay penned by Harry Kleiner (yes, they had multiple writers on films back then too!), with science fiction titan Isaac Asimov approached to write the novelization. Because Asimov penned the book at a fairly rapid pace, leading it to come out ahead of the movie due to the latter’s production delays, it was a common misconception for years that Asimov himself came up with the premise and story.

Many of the internal organs that the submarine (dubbed the Proteus) travels through were created as full-sized sets, in which a five-foot model of the craft would sail. A full-sized set of the Proteus interior was also built, along with other versions of various sizes. Fox had announced prior to production that Fantastic Voyage would be the most expensive sci-fi film made to date, and with a final budget of $6 million (about $56 million when adjusted for inflation), the picture certainly lived up to that billing.

Critical reception at the time was mostly kind, and Fantastic Voyage won Oscars for Best Special Effects and Best Art Direction . Looking at it now, it moves more slowly than modern VFX-driven blockbusters (as do most films made before, say, the mid-1990s), and as mentioned the effects have not aged all that well. But there is absolutely a sense of wonder and even awe still present in the film, the imagery is colorful, imaginative, and psychedelic, and its ticking-clock narrative still builds in suspense and tension.

With Hollywood always on the lookout for another IP to remake or reinvigorate, it stands to reason that Fantastic Voyage would be ripe for rediscovery. The basic story remains sound, from a genre point of view, and the capabilities of modern VFX houses would no doubt be able to bring the interior of the human body to life in ways that the makers of the 1966 movie could have only dreamed about.

So what’s the holdup? The truth is that Fantastic Voyage has been on the remake “to-do” list for years, but even some heavyweight genre filmmakers have been unable to get it to the starting gate, never mind across the finish line.

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Decades of Development Hell

Although there was a short-lived Saturday morning animated kids’ series that ran in 1968 on ABC, it wasn’t until 1984 that development of a new Fantastic Voyage movie , at the time as a sequel, began in earnest. Isaac Asimov was asked in 1984 to pen a sequel novel that could be then turned into a movie. His book, titled Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain , came out in 1987 and featured an entirely different story and characters, but the movie itself was never made.

The IP went dormant for more than a decade after that, until no less an auteur than James Cameron expressed an interest in remaking the original film. With his experience in working with water and sets both massive and cramped, as well as his ongoing exploration of the bleeding edge in visual effects, it’s enticing to imagine what Cameron could have done with this material.

Cameron did get as far as writing a screenplay, but after completing Titanic , his mind began to turn toward the development and creation of Avatar . He decided not to direct Fantastic Voyage , although he was willing to produce a film based on his script.

Next up was Roland Emmerich , the king of Z-movies disguised as blockbusters, who actually began pre-production on the movie in 2007. But Emmerich also rejected Cameron’s screenplay and commissioned a new one. We’ve had our issues with Cameron as a writer for sure, but this is still the guy who wrote Aliens and The Terminator , and the idea of the fellow who directed The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day: Resurgence rejecting Cameron’s script makes us both laugh and cry.

The new script got bogged down thanks to a Writers Guild strike, and Emmerich exited the project to make sure that 2012 could meet its title release year. Paul Greengrass ( The Bourne Ultimatum ) and Shawn Levy ( Free Guy ) both spent some time after that on Fantastic Voyage ’s increasingly not-so-fantastic development process, and both eventually dropped out with no results either.

Enter Guillermo del Toro . Everyone’s favorite genre filmmaker was announced to be in talks about the movie in 2016 , with David S. Goyer ( Batman Begins ) coming aboard to pen a new version of the script in collaboration with neuroscientist Justin Rhodes. While Greengrass and Levy were not especially exciting prospects, del Toro was easily the most intriguing since Cameron’s tenure on the film. While the latter would probably have brought a great deal of scientific rigor to a new Fantastic Voyage , we could easily see Del Toro turning the inside of the brain into a Gothic memory palace while making microbes and white blood cells into nightmarish Lovecraftian monsters. Alas, del Toro reportedly put the project on hold in mid-2017 to focus on completing The Shape of Water , intending to return to it in the spring of 2018.

That date came and went, and in the intervening five years, del Toro has developed, written, and directed both Nightmare Alley and his stop-motion adaptation of Pinocchio , released late last year. His next two projects are another stop-motion film , The Buried Giant , and an unnamed live-action effort, but is there any chance it could be Fantastic Voyage ?

It seems unlikely at this point. Following Disney’s purchase of 20th Century Fox in 2019, the fate of many projects in the Fox pipeline became murky or lost in development limbo, if not canceled outright. As far as we can ascertain, no one’s ever said a word about any of the scripts that were commissioned for the film, with the exception of David Goyer, who told The Scriptlab in 2015 that he and Justin Rhodes were striving to make it as “realistic” as possible.

Whether the remake ever gets made or not, Fantastic Voyage is still a landmark in the subgenre of movies about shrinking people, which stretches from 1936’s The Devil-Doll to the 1957 masterpiece The Incredible Shrinking Man , to comedies like 1989’s Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and 2015’s Ant-Man . Its influence on the latter is considerable, and aside from 1987’s Innerspace (which owes an enormous amount to Fantastic Voyage ) it remains the only live-action sci-fi movie to travel inside the human body.

But one thing that all those movies, and any potential remake, doesn’t have is the luminous presence of Raquel Welch, perhaps Fantastic Voyage ’s greatest visual effect.

Don Kaye

Don Kaye | @donkaye

Don Kaye is an entertainment journalist by trade and geek by natural design. Born in New York City, currently ensconced in Los Angeles, his earliest childhood memory is…

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VIDEO

  1. Fantastic Voyage Movie

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COMMENTS

  1. Fantastic Voyage

    Fantastic Voyage is a 1966 American science fiction adventure film directed by Richard Fleischer and written by Harry Kleiner, based on a story by Otto Klement and Jerome Bixby.The film is about a submarine crew who is shrunk to microscopic size and venture into the body of an injured scientist to repair damage to his brain.

  2. Fantastic Voyage (1966)

    Fantastic Voyage: Directed by Richard Fleischer. With Stephen Boyd, Raquel Welch, Edmond O'Brien, Donald Pleasence. When a blood clot renders a scientist comatose, a submarine and its crew are shrunk and injected into his bloodstream in order to save him.

  3. Fantastic Voyage (1966 movie)

    A scene from Fantastic Voyage (1966), directed by Richard Fleischer. Fantastic Voyage, American science-fiction film, released in 1966, that is especially noted for its special effects, which were used to simulate a journey through the human body. (Read Martin Scorsese's Britannica essay on film preservation.) Britannica Quiz.

  4. Fantastic Voyage (1966)

    Scientist Jan Benes (Jean Del Val), who knows the secret to keeping soldiers shrunken for an indefinite period, escapes from behind the Iron Curtain with the help of C.I.A. Agent Grant (Stephen Boyd). While being transferred, their motorcade is attacked. Benes strikes his head, causing a blood clot to form in his brain.

  5. Fantastic Voyage (1966)

    Fantastic Voyage (1966) -- (Movie Clip) There Should Be A Tremendous Surge Knocked off course by an undetected medical condition, supervised by military brass Arthur O'Connell and Edmond O'Brien, the crew of the miniaturized submarine (Arthur Kennedy, Stephen Boyd, Donald Pleasence, Raquel Welch, William Redfield) attempt to shoot through the temporarily stopped heart of their Cold War ...

  6. Fantastic Voyage

    Fantastic Voyage is a 1966 science fiction movie directed by Richard Fleischer.It stars Stephen Boyd, Raquel Welch, Donald Pleasence, and Edmond O'Brien.The movie is about scientists who are made miniatures in order to enter the blood stream of someone who has a blood clot in the brain.It was produced by 20th Century Fox Film Corporation.

  7. Fantastic Voyage

    The brilliant scientist Jan Benes (Jean Del Val) develops a way to shrink humans, and other objects, for brief periods of time. Benes, who is working in communist Russia, is transported by the CIA ...

  8. Fantastic Voyage

    The brilliant scientist Jan Benes (Jean Del Val) develops a way to shrink humans and other objects for brief periods of time. Working in the Soviet Union, Benes escapes from behind the Iron Curtain with the help of CIA agent Grant (Stephen Boyd), but is attacked en route. In order to save the scientist, who has developed a blood clot in his ...

  9. Everything You Need to Know About The Fantastic Voyage Movie

    The Fantastic Voyage movie production status is currently Development. December 31, 2021 • Story selection and rights acquired; idea being crafted into usable script; financing and casting attachments sought; aiming for 'greenlight' Stuck in developmental hell. No updates for quite some time.

  10. Isaac Asimov's Fantastic Voyage from Film to Novel

    Fantastic Voyage. by Isaac Asimov. Houghton Mifflin (239 pages, $3.95, Hardcover, March 1966) Cover art Dale Hennesy. Isaac Asimov's early novels were published over a period of just eight years, from Pebble In the Sky in 1950 to The Naked Sun in 1957, with linked collections like I, Robot and the Foundation "novels" along the way.

  11. Fantastic Voyage (TV series)

    Fantastic Voyage is an American animated science fiction TV series based on the famous 1966 film directed by Richard Fleischer. [1] The series consists of 17 half-hour episodes, airing Saturday mornings on ABC-TV from September 14, 1968, through January 4, 1969, then rebroadcast the following fall season. The series was produced by Filmation ...

  12. Fantastic Voyage

    Ignoring the painfully slow first third, the rest of the film is an enjoyable, basic sci-fi adventure. It won't wow you, but it will entertain you. "Fantastic Voyage" is a fun adventure with some ...

  13. SFE: Fantastic Voyage

    The novelization was Fantastic Voyage (1966) by Isaac Asimov, who doggedly repaired such filmic lapses as the abandoning of the wrecked submarine (and saboteur) within the patient's body where it would of course expand disastrously to full size. A film using a very similar theme is Joe Dante's Innerspace (1987). [PN/JB/DRL] 2.

  14. Fantastic Voyage

    Fantastic Voyage is a 1966 American science fiction adventure film directed by Richard Fleischer and written by Harry Kleiner, based on a story by Otto Klement and Jerome Bixby. The film is about a submarine crew who is shrunk to microscopic size and venture into the body of an injured scientist to repair damage to his brain. In adapting the story for his script, Kleiner abandoned all but the ...

  15. The Fantastic Journey

    The Fantastic Journey is an American science fiction television series that was originally aired on NBC from February 3 through June 16, 1977. It was originally intended to run 13 episodes, as a mid-season replacement, but NBC cancelled the series in April, after the ninth episode aired. A tenth episode, already produced, was burned off two ...

  16. Why Hasn't Fantastic Voyage Been Remade Yet?

    As we mourn the passing of '60s icon Raquel Welch, we ponder why her breakthrough sci-fi classic, Fantastic Voyage, has not received a full-on upgrade. When 1960s and '70s icon Raquel Welch ...

  17. Fantastic Voyage

    Stephen Boyd, Donald Pleasence and Raquel Welch star in this imaginative sci-fi adventure. When a scientist who holds the secret of miniaturization goes coma...

  18. Raquel Welch

    Raquel Welch. Jo Raquel Welch ( née Tejada; September 5, 1940 - February 15, 2023) was an American actress. Welch first garnered attention for her role in Fantastic Voyage (1966), after which she signed a long-term contract with 20th Century Fox. They lent her contract to the British studio Hammer Film Productions, for whom she made One ...