Fantastic Voyage is a 1966 science fiction film written by Harry Kleiner. Bantam Books obtained the rights for a paperback novelization based on the screenplay and approached Isaac Asimov to write it.[1] Because the novelization was released six months before the movie, many people mistakenly believed Asimov's book had inspired the movie.[2] According to Fred Schodt's The Astro Boy Essays, FOX also approached NBC to get the rights to an Astro Boy episode which had the same premise, but they never contacted the manga artist or credited him in the final product.
The movie inspired an animated television series, as well as a painting of the same name by Salvador Dalí.[3]
Plot
The United States and the Soviet Union have both developed technology that allowed matter to be miniaturized using a process that shrinks individual atoms, but its value is limited because objects shrunk return to normal size after a period of time - the smaller an object is made, the quicker it reverts.
Scientist Jan Benes, working behind the Iron Curtain, has figured out how to make the shrinking process work indefinitely. With the help of the CIA, he escapes to the West, but an attempted assassination leaves him comatose, with a blood clot in his brain.
To save his life, Charles Grant (the agent who extracted him, played by Stephen Boyd), pilot Captain Bill Owens (William Redfield), Dr. Michaels (Donald Pleasence), surgeon Dr. Peter Duval (Arthur Kennedy) and his assistant Cora Peterson (Raquel Welch) board a submarine, the Proteus, which is then miniaturized and injected into Benes. The ship is reduced to one micrometre in length, giving the team only one hour to repair the clot; after that, the submarine will begin to revert to its normal size and become large enough for Benes' immune system to detect and attack.
The crew faces many obstacles on their journey. They are forced to detour through the heart (a temporary cardiac arrest must be induced to avoid destructive turbulence), the inner ear (all in the lab must remain quiet to prevent similar turbulence) and the alveoli of the lungs (where they replenish their supply of oxygen). When the surgical laser needed to destroy the clot is damaged, it becomes obvious there is a saboteur on the mission. They cannibalize their radio to repair the laser. When they finally reach the brain clot, there are only six minutes remaining to operate and then exit the body.
The traitor, Dr. Michaels, knocks Owens out and takes control of the Proteus while the rest of the crew is outside for the operation. Duval successfully removes the clot with the laser. Michaels tries to crash the sub into the clot area to kill Benes, but Grant fires the laser at the ship, causing it to veer away and crash. Michaels is trapped in the wreckage and killed when a white blood cell attacks and destroys the Proteus. Grant saves Owens from the ship, and they all swim desperately to one of the eyes, where they escape via a teardrop.
When they are outside the Proteus in body fluids when miniaturized, they scuba dive with oxygen rebreathers, white overalls or diving suits, and no swimfins.
Cast
Production
Isaac Asimov, asked to write the novel from the script, declared that the script was full of plot holes, and got permission to write the book the way he wanted. The novel came out first because he wrote fast and because of delays in filming. [1]
The "whirlpool" scene where the two-inch Proteus miniature was spun around and sucked into a fistula shortly after the sub was injected into Benes' bloodstream was made using a large punch bowl, strawberry-flavored milk, and three cups of Cheerios cereal. According to L.B. Abbott,[citation needed] a bird stole the miniature while it was drying on a window sill following a paint touch-up. It has never been recovered, and Abbott jokingly theorized that it is probably still part of some bird's nest up in some tree.
Donald Pleasance's final scene involved a lot of screaming in agony. Much of that turned out to be real,[citation needed] as the soap suds that were used to represent the white blood cells attacking him had gotten into his eyes, and as he was trapped in the command chair as the scene called for, he was unable to wipe his eyes free of the suds or receive medical attention until the scene was safely 'in the can'.
Much of the interior scenes of the secret complex were filmed at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena at night. Brief glimpses of the outside playing field area can be seen as General Carter takes Grant through the complex on a small golf cart, as they pass the stairway entrances to each section of the stadium.
The entire operating theater, control room, and miniaturization chamber were all one contiguous set. The only piece of this area of the complex that was separate was the sterilization chamber.
The rebreathers appear to be the Dräger Ray or the Dräger Dolphin but with , and with the backpack casing removed or painted black, and the loop of breathing tubes replaced with a long single breathing tube running over the left shoulder to an industrial-looking fullface mask with a big window folded back at the sides to leave the actors' faces visible.
The scenes of swimming outside the Proteus were shot in the dry with actors suspended from wires. To look like swimming in a resisting medium, the scenes were shot at speed 150% normal, i.e. at two-thirds of the usual number of frames per second.[2]
The film was originally planned to have an epilogue,[citation needed] with Dr. Benes having recovered from the microsurgery. However, despite the success of the mission, he still suffered some minor brain damage; specifically the portion of his memory that contained the secret of how to maintain a miniaturized state for longer than an hour. Verified as genuine,[citation needed] copies of scripts containing this ending have circulated in conventions for years, and can be found on the Internet. Asimov's novelization includes a similar epilogue, though omitting the memory loss.
Reuse of sets and props
The actual full-sized set and prop for the Proteus was placed in storage at the 20th Century Fox backlot for years,[citation needed] and maintained in relatively good condition. It was brought out of retirement briefly for use in filming a Public Service Announcement in 1972 for the American Medical Association on the risks of heart disease. Shortly afterwards, it was painted orange and modified for use as a rescue vessel in Irwin Allen's disaster film, The Poseidon Adventure.[citation needed] However, due to budget constraints, all scenes featuring the rescue craft were cut before any scenes were filmed, and the hull of the modified Proteus was later scrapped.
Parts of the miniature sets, as well as some of the full-sized sets, were "borrowed" by Irwin Allen for use on some of his various TV shows. The season one Lost in Space episode, "The Derelict" features the brain set used as the interior for the alien spaceship that has swallowed the Jupiter 2. The brain cells were explained to be a "crystaline power source." One of the blood vessel sets was used as a conveyor tube in an episode of Lost in Space where Will Robinson has just been converted into a diminutive duplicate of Dr. Zachary Smith. Part of the inner ear miniature set was used in the episode "Jonah and the Whale" on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. The laser gun was used on several of Allen's series as an alien weapon prop.
Much of the aforementioned usage of sets and props from Fantastic Voyage in Irwin Allen's TV efforts can be attributed to two facts[citation needed]: Special effects for both efforts were supervised by L. B. Abbott, and both were filmed in adjacent stages at the 20th Century Fox studios. Paul Zastupnevich, Allen's associate during the majority of his science-fiction TV work, stated in numerous interviews that the use of the Fantastic Voyage sets and props was, at times, due to "midnight requisitioning" on the part of both Allen and Abbott. Richard Basehart also referred to specifics on filming the episode "Jonah and the Whale" of having to film certain scenes long after normal studio hours because they were "borrowing" a set from another production and had to finish shooting before that production resumed shooting the following morning.
Music
The score was composed and conducted by Leonard Rosenman. The composer deliberately wrote no music for the first four reels of the film, before the protagonists enter the human body. Rosenman wrote that "the harmony for the entire score is almost completely atonal except for the very end when our heroes grow to normality."[4]
The complete score was released in 1998 on compact disc, on Film Score Monthly records.
Background
Logical flaws and biological errors
In the original movie, the crew (apart from the saboteur) manage to leave Benes' body safely before reverting to normal size, but the Proteus remains inside, as do the remains of the saboteur's body (albeit digested by a white blood cell), as well as several gallons (full scale) of a carrier solution (presumably saline) used in the injection syringe. Isaac Asimov pointed out[5] that this was a serious logical flaw in the plot, since the submarine (even if reduced to bits of debris) would also revert to normal size, killing Benes in the process. Therefore, in his novelization Asimov had the crew provoke the white cell into following them, so that it drags the submarine to the tearduct. The submarine (or rather, the wreckage of it) then expands outside Benes' body.
Moreover, the scene where the crew collects air from Benes' lungs after their own supply is sabotaged should not work, as the air consists of normal-sized molecules. Asimov's novelization solved this problem as well by including a miniaturization device in the jury-rigged suction machine. However, in the movie, the unminiaturized air was used only to pressurize a tank for ballast, not for breathing.
Besides the above-mentioned question about collecting and breathing normal-sized air molecules, and more generally the problem of shrinking molecules, there are also some thought-provoking nuts-and-bolts-medical/biological/physical errors in the movie. In order to replace lost air, they go to the lung and poke the air-collecting pipe through the alveolar wall just as the patient begins to INhale. This would further drain the air from their tank, because air-pressure in the lung during inhalation is low (that's why the air rushes in!). They should have poked as the patient began to EXhale, when high air-pressure in the lung would drive the air from the lung into the tank, just as it drives air out through the nose or mouth.
Dr. Michaels gets attacked by a white blood cell, in the brain. But immune cells of the blood do not cross the blood-brain barrier. (I suppose it could have happened because of the injury, the patient was bleeding into his brain through torn barrier-cells. But the serious bleeding had already clotted off, so that's not too likely.)
Raquel Welch's character gets attacked by a swarm of antibodies. In fact it takes weeks for the blood to generate antibodies which bind to a new target, and there has to be a fair amount of the target floating around. One molecule or one cell or one miniaturized diver won't provoke the immune response. The only way it could have happened as it did in the movie would be if the patient had been previously vaccinated with milligram amounts of miniaturized Raquel-clones.
The walls of the arteries, with the red (oxygen-rich) blood, should have been pulsating with the heartbeat, and the sub would be jerked from side to side, away from and back toward the center of the artery, continuously, by the pulses of blood pressure, just like the walls of the artery itself. The motion should have been just about as intolerable as the turbulence they encounterd in the fistula.
Novelization
After acquiring the film's paperback novelization rights, Bantam Books approached Isaac Asimov to write the novelization, offering him a flat sum of $5,000 with no royalties involved. In his autobiography In Joy Still Felt, Asimov writes, "I turned down the proposal out of hand. Hackwork, I said. Beneath my dignity."[6] However, Bantam Books persisted, and at a meeting with Marc Jaffe and Marcia Nassiter on April 21, 1965, Asimov agreed to read the screenplay.
In the novelization's introduction, Asimov states that he was rather reluctant to write the book because he believed that the miniaturization of matter was physically impossible. But he decided that it was still good fodder for story-telling and that it could still make for some intelligent reading. Plus it was known that 20th Century Fox wanted someone with some science-fiction clout to help promote the film. To his credit, aside from the initial "impossibility" of the shrinking machine, Asimov went to great lengths to accurately portray what it would actually be like to be shrunk to that scale, such as the lights on the sub being highly penetrating to normal matter, time distortion, and other side effects that are completely ignored in the movie.
As noted above, Asimov was bothered by the way the Proteus was left in Benes, and in a subsequent meeting with Jaffe he insisted that he would have to change the ending so that the submarine was brought out. Asimov also felt the need to gain permission from his usual science fiction publisher, Doubleday, to do the novel. Not only did Doubleday not object, it had been they who had suggested his name to Bantam in the first place. Asimov began work on the novel on May 31, and completed it on July 23.[7]
Asimov did not want any of his books, even a film novelization, to appear only in paperback, so in August he persuaded Austin Olney of Houghton Mifflin to publish a hardcover edition, assuring him that the book would sell at least eight thousand copies, which it did.[8] However, since the rights to the story were held by Otto Klement, who had co-written the original story treatment, Asimov would not be entitled to any royalties. By the time the hardcover edition was published in March 1966, Houghton Mifflin had persuaded Klement to allow Asimov to have a quarter of the royalties.[9] Klement also negotiated for The Saturday Evening Post to serialize an abridged version of the novel, and he agreed to give Asimov half the payment for it. Fantastic Voyage appeared in the February 26 and March 12, 1966 issues of the Post.[10]
Bantam Books released the paperback edition of the novel in September 1966 to coincide with the release of the film.[11]
Related novels and comics
Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain, was written by Isaac Asimov as an attempt to develop and present his own story apart from the 1966 screenplay. This novel is not a sequel to the original, but instead is a separate story taking place in the Soviet Union with an entirely different set of characters.
Fantastic Voyage: Microcosm is a third interpretation, written by Kevin J. Anderson, published in 2001. This version has the crew of the Proteus explore the body of a dead alien that crash-lands on earth, and updates the story with such modern concepts as nanotechnology (replacing killer white cells).
A comic book adaptation of the film was released by Gold Key in 1967. Drawn by industry legend Wally Wood, the book followed the plot of the movie with general accuracy, but many scenes were depicted differently and/or outright dropped, and the ending was given an epilogue similar as that seen in some of the early draft scripts for the film.
In Popular Culture
- The film was parodied in the Futurama episode Parasites Lost. Fantastic Voyage was not referenced explicitly, however. The Doctor Who adventure The Invisible Enemy is an homage to the film in which miniaturised clones of the Doctor and his companion Leela are injected into his infected brain (interestingly, Futurama references Doctor Who as much as the original; its character Leela is named for the show's character).
- Fantastic Voyage was also parodied in a The Simpsons Hallowe'en episode, Treehouse of Horror XV.
- The film was also parodied on the Sealab 2021 episode "Craptastic Voyage", however there are more Star Wars references.
- The popular 1980 film Airplane! contains a long running gag about quitting various harmful vices which is a subtle homage to Fantastic Voyage (specifically, the conversational banter in which the colonel and the general trade quips, and particularly the scene where the colonel teases the general about eliminating sugar in his coffee).
Awards
The film won two Academy Awards and was nominated for three more:[12]
- Won
- Nominated
Adaptations
1968 Animated television series
Two years after the film was released, ABC aired an animated series on Saturday mornings. The series was produced by Filmation.
In the series, a different team of scientists performed their missions in a craft known as Voyager, a submarine which featured wedge-shaped wings and large, swept T-tail, and was capable of flight. A model kit of Voyager was offered by Aurora Model Company for several years, and has become a sought-after collectors' item since then. As of June, 2008, the Voyager kit has been re-released by the Moebius model company.
Remake
Plans for a remake or sequel have been in discussion since at least 1984, but the project has been stuck in development hell ever since. In 1984, Isaac Asimov was approached to write Fantastic Voyage II, out of which a movie would be made.[13] Asimov "was sent a suggested outline" that mirrored the movie Innerspace and "involved two vessels in the bloodstream, one American and one Soviet, and what followed was a kind of submicroscopic version of World War III."[13] Asimov was against such an approach. Following a dispute between publishers, the original commissioners of the novel approached Philip Farmer, who "wrote a novel and sent [in] the manuscript" that was rejected despite "stick[ing] tightly to the outline [that was sent to Asimov."[13] "It dealt with World War III in the bloodstream, and it was full of action and excitement."[13] Although Asimov urged the publisher to accept Farmer's manuscript, it was insisted that Asimov write the novel. So, Asimov eventually wrote the book in his own way ("completely different in plot from what [Farmer] had written"), which was eventually published by Doubleday in 1987 as Fantastic Voyage II and "dealt not with competing submarines in the bloodstream, but with one submarine, with [an] American hero cooperating (not entirely voluntarily) with four Soviet crew members."[13] The novel was not made into a movie, however.
James Cameron was also interested in directing a remake (since at least 1997),[14] but decided to devote his efforts to his Avatar project. He still remained open to the idea of producing a feature based on his own screenplay, and in 2007, 20th Century Fox announced that pre-production on the project was finally underway. Roland Emmerich agreed to direct, but rejected the script written by Cameron.[14][15] Marianne and Cormac Wibberley were hired to write a new script, but the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike delayed filming, and Emmerich began working on 2012 instead.[15][16]
References
Bibliography
- Asimov, Isaac (1980). In Joy Still Felt: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954-1978. New York: Avon. ISBN 0380530252.
Notes
- ^ Asimov 1980. p. 363.
- ^ Asimov 1980:390.
- ^ "Lot description for Dali's Le voyage fantastique". The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale (February 6, 2007). Christie's website. http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lfsearch/LotDescription.aspx?intObjectId=4856995. Retrieved 2007-01-29.
- ^ Bond, Jeff (1998). Release notes for Fantastic Voyage by Leonard Rosenman, p. 2 (CD insert notes). Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.: Film Score Monthly (Vol. 1, No. 3).
- ^ Asimov 1980:363-364
- ^ Asimov 1980:363
- ^ Asimov 1980:366-370
- ^ Asimov 1980:371
- ^ Asimov 1980:390
- ^ Asimov 1980:388-389
- ^ Asimov 1980:407
- ^ "NY Times: Fantastic Voyage". NY Times. http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/16772/Fantastic-Voyage/awards. Retrieved 2008-12-27.
- ^ a b c d e I, Asimov. Isaac Asimov. p. 501. Batnam Book. 1994.
- ^ a b "Roland Emmerich Tries To Explain Why James Cameron’s Fantastic Voyage Script Sucked". slashfilm.com. September 26, 2007. http://www.slashfilm.com/2007/09/26/roland-emmerich-tries-to-explain-why-james-camerons-fantastic-voyage-script-sucked/. Retrieved 2008-08-20.
- ^ a b "Exclusive: Emmerich On Fantastic Voyage". empireonline.com. September 27, 2007. http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=21109. Retrieved 2008-08-20.
- ^ "Emmerich to captain 'Voyage'". variety.com. August 15, 2007. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117970307.html?categoryid=13&cs=1&query=fantastic+voyage. Retrieved 2007-08-15.
See also
External links
