Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is a 1961 American science fiction disaster film, produced and directed by Irwin Allen, and starring Walter Pidgeon and Robert Sterling.

The supporting cast includes Peter Lorre, Joan Fontaine, Barbara Eden, Michael Ansara, and Frankie Avalon.

After rescuing scientist Miguel Alvarez and his dog at Ice Floe Delta, Seaview receives a radio message from Mission Director Inspector Bergan at the Bureau of Marine Exploration.

After piercing the Van Allen radiation belt, a meteor shower caught on fire, resulting in an increase in the global temperature.

Nelson and Emery propose extinguishing the fire by launching a nuclear missile at the burning belt from the Mariana Islands.

The Seaview races to reach the optimal firing position above the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench in time for the needed angle of trajectory.

The Seaview's main generator is then sabotaged by a crew member who lost his mind, forcing Nelson to order Crane to proceed while repairs are made despite the risk of traveling without power for the sonar and radar.

A hostile submarine pursues them, diving into the Mariana Trench, exceeding its crush depth; it implodes before it can destroy Seaview.

Crane encounters Dr. Hiller, the saboteur, atop the shark tank, as she exits the restricted nuclear reactor core.

The citation began with the words, "For outstanding achievement in completing the first voyage in history across the top of the world, by cruising under the Arctic ice cap from the Bering Strait to the Greenland Sea".

On January 23, 1960, Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh (USN), in the bathyscaphe Trieste, made the first descent to the bottom of the Challenger Deep.

The Challenger Deep is the deepest surveyed spot in the world's oceans, and is located in the Mariana Trench, southwest of Guam.

[7] From February 16, 1960, to May 10, 1960, the submarine USS Triton, under the command of Captain Edward L. Beach, Jr., made the first submerged circumnavigation of the world.

At the time that Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was made, the Van Allen radiation belts had only recently been discovered, and most of what the film states concerning them is fiction.

Discoveries since then clearly invalidate what the film says: the Van Allen belts (actually somewhat more radiation-dense portions of the magnetosphere) are made up of sub-atomic particles trapped by the Earth's magnetic field in the vacuum of space and cannot catch fire, as fire requires oxygen, fuel, and an ignition source, all of which are insufficient in the Van Allen Belts.

The film's submarine design is unique in featuring an eight-window bow viewport that provides panoramic undersea views.

The lower hull also has an exterior shark-like bow flare, and the stern has tail fins reminiscent of a Cadillac circa 1959.

In the film, the USOS Seaview (United States Oceanographic Survey) is under the authority of Nelson and the Bureau of Marine Exploration rather than the U.S. Navy.

[12] The role of Captain Crane was originally offered to David Hedison, who turned it down after completing Allen's The Lost World (1960), saying that he did not like the script.

Frankie Avalon's appearance was one of several he made in films around this time where he was cast to appeal to teen audiences; he also sang the title track.

[14] Set designer Herman Blumenthal did not approach the Navy to do research; he relied solely on pictures of naval vessels in the media.

For the filming of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, detailed sets, props and scale models were created to realize the Seaview submarine.

When Irwin Allen decided to make a Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea television series, all he had to do was pull the sets out of storage.

During the series run, the film's storyline was remade as a one-hour episode, written by Willam Welch, and titled "The Sky's on Fire".

In June 1961, Pyramid Books published a novelization of the film by science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon.

One of those reprintings pictures Richard Basehart and David Hedison on the cover, but the book is still based on the Walter Pidgeon film.