Raquel Welch – Fantastic Voyage (1966) – There are a few movies that define a generation and in the process, expose so many young minds towards fantasies of young ladies in tight rubber wetsuits. Fantastic Voyage is possibly the seminal wetsuit fetishists film. Starring a young Raquel Welch in her first major feature film roll. Fantastic Voyage is a Sci-Fi film about a journey into the mind of a scientist to repair a life threatening brain injury.
I was surfing eBay when I stumbled across a listing for 5 original transparencies of the delightful Raquel in her ever so tight white rubber wetsuit. The film (particularly the antibody sequence) formed and shaped my desire to photograph the female form under neoprene rubber. I felt compelled to part with quite a sizeable chunk of money so I could own these little slices of history.
I’d love to hear if Raquel in her wetsuit, encased in figure hugging antibodies had the same effect on you as it did to my young mind when I first saw the film in the late 70s. As she gasps for breath… “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe…”. What a moment! Let me know if you have any information about the wetsuit Miss Welch is wearing, or any details on the shooting process.
You may be interested in another eBay find of mine.
2 replies on “Raquel Welch – Fantastic Voyage (1966)”
Wonderful; a couple I didn’t knew! Sure, I can tell you a lot about the scene and the wetsuit… Raquel still owns it, she kept it after the production ended. It is custom made, so they made a mould from her body to make it fit like a second skin. And she had to wear it for hours daily for almost a year! Actually is a two piece, the trousers and the jacket, with a zipper in the waist. About the scene, as many things in the movie, they made that particular plastic for the movie… the first time they made the antibodies they melt due to the heat of the reflectors! So they had to make a second batch and keep them into buckets with ice water until they needed… To make the attack scene they stick the antibodies to Raquel’s wetsuit and they pull them off with nylon wires, then the scene was printed in reverse. And there’s a contact sheet that shows Raquel seated straight on two chairs with her body encased in them, she could not move until the scene was ready to film! And the scene of the removal of the antibodies had to be filmed three times… In fact there was hours and hours of deleted scenes and retakes, that must be still in the Fox vaults; sadly no one took the work to look for them, restaure them and add them to the features of the DVD or Blue Ray editions…
Amazing! Thank you Osvaldo!