Before Star Trek, Scotty Actor James Doohan Appeared In A Classic '60s Sci-Fi Movie

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James Doohan is inseparable from the role of Scotty, terrible accent and all. The actor made the "Star Trek" character famous with his work on "Star Trek: The Original Series" (which aired from 1966 to 1969) before returning to the part for several "Star Trek" movies starting, roughly, a decade later. But Doohan had been acting for years before he suited up on the Enterprise. Indeed, right before that life-changing role came his way, he starred in a 1960s sci-fi classic.

Though he wasn't one of the core cast members, Doohan starred alongside the likes of the legendary Raquel Welch and Stephen Boyd in 1966's "Fantastic Voyage." Directed by Richard Fleischer, it was an ambitious movie for its time with an intriguing premise. Doohan portrayed a character by the name of Dr. Sawyer, a hypothermia technician. It was a minor role, but it's one that put him in another bit of genre history to go with his run on the "Star Trek" franchise.

"Fantastic Voyage" centers on Jan Benes (Jean Del Val), a scientist who develops a way to shrink humans and other objects for brief periods of time. Benes, who is working in communist Russia, is then transported by the CIA to the United States, but he's attacked on the way. So, in order to save him from a blood clot in his brain, a team of individuals in a nuclear submarine is shrunk and injected into his body. However, they have a limited amount of time to fix the clot and get out before the miniaturization wears off.

"Fantastic Voyage" was a relatively expensive movie for its time and was only a modest hit in its day. Of course, thanks to TV and, eventually, home media, its status as a classic within the genre became firmly cemented.

As it were, "Fantastic Voyage" is a beloved classic of '60s science fiction and has proven to be highly influential, holding an impressive 91% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Whether the movie fully holds up to modern scrutiny is another question entirely, but it does feature a whole lot of clever visual effects, particularly for when it was made. In the end, they do a nice job of getting viewers to believe that the film's scientists are, in fact, actually journeying through someone's body in miniature form.

The movie's influence was never clearer than it was back when a remake was in the works in the 2010s. At one point, even Guillermo del Toro was set to helm a "Fantastic Voyage" re-imagining, with James Cameron attached to produce. Other A-list filmmakers came and went as well, but the project continued to languish in development hell and fell by the wayside entirely after del Toro announced his plan to take a year off from directing on the heels of completing the Best Picture Oscar-winning "The Shape of Water." One can only imagine what the guy behind "Pacific Rim" and the director of "Avatar" could do with this concept using today's technology. Alas.

As for James Doohan, his career took off after this movie came out in 1966, in no small part thanks to the fact that "Star Trek: The Original Series" premiered that same year. He would go on to amass many, many other acting credits through to the early 2000s (up until his passing in 2005). Small as Doohan's role may have been in the movie, "Fantastic Voyage" very much helped pave the way for his eventual success.

You can grab "Fantastic Voyage" on Blu-ray or DVD from Amazon.