10 Times Doctor Who Shamelessly Ripped Off Hollywood

2. The Invisible Enemy's Plot Is Nearly Identical To Fantastic Voyage

Doctor Who The Invisible Enemy
BBC

In 1966, 20th Century Fox released Fantastic Voyage, a movie about a group of people who are shrunk down to a microscopic size, before being injected into a dying scientist's body in order to remove a blood clot.

Then, 11 years later, the BBC aired a Doctor Who serial called The Invisible Enemy, in which a clone of the Fourth Doctor is shrunk down to a microscopic size and injected into his own body, in order to combat a dangerous virus.

It's abundantly clear where The Invisible Enemy got its inspiration from, and on top of the serial sharing an overall concept with Fantastic Voyage, there are also some really specific similarities between the two stories.

For example, Fantastic Voyage ends with the miniaturised crew emerging from the body via a tear duct, an escape method that is also utilised in The Invisible Enemy. Both stories also share the idea of the miniaturisation being time-limited - around ten minutes in The Invisible Enemy, and one hour in Fantastic Voyage.

Doctor Who didn't even try to hide this one, but at least we got a fun serial out of it!

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.