1966 WEEK Meets REEL RETRO CINEMA: New looks at old flicks, and their comics connections… — Welcome to 1966 WEEK — a 60th anniversary celebration of an extraordinary, landmark year in popular culture. For seven days, we’re bringing you a whole host of features on everything from Star Trek, to Batman, to the Beatles, to the Monkees, and much, much more. (Just check out Walt Grogan’s latest fab banner, above!) Click here for more of the far out fun! — Dan — By ROB KELLY While network TV offered multiple sources of entertainment for fans of science fiction/fantasy/horror — Lost in Space, Batman, the soon-to-debut Star Trek — the pickings were relatively slim in movie theaters. Unlike their TV counterparts, movie studios were slow to realize there was a burgeoning market for material aimed at younger viewers that had aged out of Disney movies. For the most part, film executives relegated genre movies to lower budgets and diminished expectations. One exception was Fantastic Voyage, which debuted 60 years ago, on August 24, 1966. 20th Century Fox put enormous resources behind it, hiring 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’s Richard Fleischer to direct and assigning a top-notch production crew to give the film a hip, modern look and feel. From the eye-catching (no pun intended) minimalist poster by the legendary Saul Bass to the kinetic opening credits, to the eye-popping (dammit, I did it again) color palate, Fantastic Voyage takes an old school Men (and Women) of Action derring-do story and applies a “mod” filter to it. The film stars Stephen Boyd, Raquel Welch, Arthur Kennedy, William Redfield, and Donald Pleasance as a team of government agents and scientists who, aboard their ship Proteus, get miniaturized and injected into the bloodstream of a scientist working behind the Iron Curtain who was almost assassinated. The victim has an inoperable brain clot, so Boyd’s Grant leads the mission to fix it and get out in less than 60 minutes, the time limit of the miniaturization process. This is such a simple, genius idea for a sci-fi movie I was shocked to learn it wasn’t based on a book or is an adaptation of any kind — it was an original story by writers Otto Klement and Jerome Bixby (who would go on to write for the aforementioned Star Trek). The crew of the Proteus are met with one threat after another, as the...