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.

Its modern and imaginative production design received five nominations at the 39th Academy Awards mostly in technical departments, winning for Best Visual Effects and Best Art Direction in Color.

The movie used the concept of miniaturization in science fiction along with The Incredible Shrinking Man and inspired an animated television series of the same name.

An undetected arteriovenous fistula forces them to detour through the heart, where cardiac arrest must be induced to, at best, reduce turbulence that would be strong enough to destroy Proteus.

The crew must cannibalize their wireless radio to repair the laser, cutting off all communication and guidance from the outside, although because the submarine is nuclear-powered, surgeons and technicians outside Benes's body are still able to track their movements via a radioactive tracer, allowing General Alan Carter and Colonel Donald Reid, the officers in charge of CMDF, to figure out the crew's strategies as they make their way through the body.

Grant fires the laser at the ship, causing it to veer away and crash, and Michaels to get trapped in the wreckage with the controls pinning him to the seat, which attracts the attention of white blood cells.

[14] For the technical and artistic elaboration of the subject, Fleischer asked for the collaboration of two people of the crew that he had worked with on the production of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the film he directed for Walt Disney in 1954.

The plasma effect was produced by chief operator Ernest Laszlo via the use of multicolored turning lights, placed on the outside of translucent decors.

The weekly entertainment-trade magazine Variety gave the film a positive pre-release review, stating, "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.

[20] Richard Schickel of Life magazine wrote that the rewards would be "plentiful" to audiences who get over the "real whopper" of suspended disbelief required.

The website's critics consensus reads: "The special effects may be a bit dated today, but Fantastic Voyage still holds up well as an imaginative journey into the human body.

In the novelization's introduction, Asimov states that he was 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.

He discussed the ability of the lights on the submarine to penetrate normal matter, issues of time distortion, and other side effects that the movie does not address.

Isaac Asimov pointed out that this was a serious logical flaw in the plot,[26] 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 tear duct, and its wreckage expands outside Benes's body.

[29] 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.

[33] 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.

Drawn by 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.

[38] Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain (1987) was written by Isaac Asimov as an attempt to develop and present his own story apart from the 1966 screenplay.

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).

[39] 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.

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.

[40][41] 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.

[41][42] In spring 2010, Paul Greengrass was considering directing the remake from a script written by Shane Salerno and produced by James Cameron, but later dropped out to be replaced by Shawn Levy.

"[46] The concept of entering the human body popularized by Fantastic Voyage has been greatly influential especially in animated TV shows, of which there are several examples: