The Boy in the Plastic Bubble is a 1976 American made for television drama film inspired by the lives of David Vetter and Ted DeVita, who lacked effective immune systems.

In the United Kingdom, the TV movie was released on PAL DVD by Prism Leisure in 2001 before it finally made its terrestrial television debut on Channel 5 in 2006.

After multiple previous miscarriages and the death of their first son (who was born without a functioning immune system), Mickey fears the likelihood that something gravely wrong could happen to their child.

Tod and his parents create protective clothing, similar in style to a space suit with tanks of sterilized air, so he can attend school in person.

When Gina is accepted to the Pratt Institute's art school in Brooklyn, New York, Tod is fearful of losing her forever.

Vetter scoffed at the idea that Travolta's character could simply wear the spacesuit back into the isolator without contaminating the bubble.

[3] Days after Bill Clinton was inaugurated as U.S. President, William Safire reported on the phrase "in the bubble" as used in reference to living in the White House.

[4] Safire traced that usage in U.S. presidential politics to a passage in the 1990 political memoir What I Saw at the Revolution by Peggy Noonan, where she used it to characterize Ronald Reagan's "wistfulness about connection"; Richard Ben Cramer used the phrase two years later in What It Takes: The Way to the White House with reference to George H. W. Bush and how he had been "cosseted and cocooned in comfort by 400 people devoted to his security" and "never s[aw] one person who was not a friend or someone whose sole purpose it was to serve or protect him.