20 Things You Somehow Missed In Never Say Never Again
7. The Submarine Footage Was Not Shot For The Film
In the novel of Thunderball, James Bond and Felix Leiter shadow Emilio Largo's yacht, the Disco Volante onboard the submarine, Manta, before attacking Largo and his SPECTRE thugs with primitive weapons whilst they try to prime a bomb underneath a Bahamian missile base.
In Never Say Never Again, Bond and Leiter board a far better equipped submarine to shadow Maximillian Largo's The Flying Saucer. The American submarine not only lays waste to Largo's Palmyra fortress with its deck gun, but also houses missile-propelled jet packs that allow Bond and his CIA ally to reach Largo's underground cavern.
The thing is that, whilst special effects were used to show the submarine firing upon Palmyra, the remainder of the footage of the vessel underway was actually drawn from John Sturges's 1968 adaptation of Alistair MacLean's novel, Ice Station Zebra.