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Movies and TV Exploring Inside the Human Body

Movies and TV offer us a window into the phantasms of the unreal, and what is more unreal--and fantastic--than an adventure within the human body, where the microscopic becomes insurmountable?

By Anthony GramugliaPublished 7 years ago 8 min read
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There's something truly fascinating about exploring inside the human body from a comfortable position on your sofa. No need to roll on the plastic gloves. No sterile scalpels or pale blue smocks. Nothing squishy and sticky to plunge your hands into.

Plenty of movies and TV shows grant us an inside tour of the human body, sparing us the need to dirty our hands with blood and viscera. Now, I'm not talking about watching Freddy Krueger grind Johnny Depp into a geyser of blood--entertaining as that is. I'm talking about stories that take place INSIDE the human body. The shows where we watch the characters on screen shrink down to size to explore the micro-universe within the human body. Adventure! Mystery! Treating the body less like a sack of meat, and more like the untold reaches of space--going where no man has gone before!

Movies and TV offer us a window into the phantasms of the unreal, and what is more unreal--and fantastic--than an adventure within the human body, where the microscopic becomes insurmountable?

Chris Rock and Bill Murray star in this half-animated/half-live-action film.

The live-action half of the film features Frank (Murray), a gross, fairly lazy guy who has no regard for his bodily health. The animated half features the titular character, Osmosis Jones (Rock)--a white blood cell that polices Frank's immune system. His work puts him in the path of a virus called Thrax (played by Laurence Fishborne) intent on killing Frank in record time. Alongside a Cold Pill named Drix, Osmosis sets out to save Frank and restore his good name among the police force.

Although the film underperformed at the box office, it found success on the home video market, becoming something of a cult classic among a generation of kids.

It's an entertaining and imaginative buddy-cop film that also incorporates a ton of really clever, imaginative imagery. This is one of the few films where Bill Murray is probably one of the weaker elements, since, whenever he comes on screen, you just want to go back inside of him--wait, that sounds awkward...

Also, William Shatner is in it. He's inside Bill Murray's body... wait...

The Magic School Bus is an educational television staple.

Originally a series of books, it made the leap to TV in 1994. The series follows Miss Frizzle and her class of never-aging students. Miss Frizzle has a slightly unethical, highly dangerous method of teaching her students new lessons: she takes them without parental permission onto her magical, sentient school bus, which has the eldritch ability to transform itself and teleport to various vistas of reality.

Seriously, why is only one of these kids terrified of going on field trips? Don't they know that exploring the unknown may mean they'll die a horrible death?

There are multiple episodes in the series where they go inside the human body. Most noteworthy is the episode “Inside Ralphie.” In this episode, Miss Frizzle shrinks her class inside bus to a microscopic level, and travel into Ralphie's (one of her students) body to see what's making him sick. However, Raphie's immune system recognizes the foreign human beings traveling through his organs as a threat. White blood cells follow after the bus to attack it.

Other noteworthy episodes include "Flexes Its Muscles," "For Lunch," "Gets Eaten," "Works Out," and "Goes Cellular" (the one where Arnold's skin turns orange because of the food he eats. Yes. The show got even weirder toward the end).

Woody Allen is a controversial film maker. It is understandable if you find the controversy surrounding his lifestyle discomforting enough to justify giving this film a pass.

It is also undeniable that his 1972 comedy is quite funny (Seriously, the Gene Wilder parts are worth watching on their own). It's also stiff, awkward, and really, really weird.

The film is divided into numerous segments, each funny and entertaining in their own rights. However, most noteworthy to the intents of this article is the final segment. In it, a navigator played by Tony Randall, assisted by Burt Reynolds, take a spaceship-esque vehicle into a person's body in the instant of coitous. Their intentions? To witness what occurs inside a person's body in the instant of ejaculation. Apparently, sperm cells look like Woody Allen in a white suit with glasses.

This movie is really, really weird.

Joe Dante is a highly underrated director of genre fiction. The guy made Gremlins and The Howling, two of the 80s's greatest creature features.

Dante also made this semi-obscure Steven Spielberg produced film, which starred a young Dennis Quaid.

Tuck, a young naval aviator, (Quaid) is part of a secret experiment. He's brought into a pod that shrinks him down to the size of a microbe. The intention is for him to be injected into a rabbit. However, following an action-packed series of events, he ends up getting injected into an unsuspecting mall clerk (played by comedian Martin Short).

The film takes the prospect of shrinking inside a human body, and runs with it. Tuck uses optic nerves to see the outside world, bounces around ear drums, and even, at one point, ends up in a person's womb. (Funny how it keeps coming back to that with all these movies...)

While the film doesn't have a whole lot of educational elements, it's a highly entertaining throw-back to 50s science fiction that should leave you on the edge of your seat--or, at the very least, fairly entertained.

I don't need to explain Rick and Morty to you. Chances are it's on in the background right now while you're flipping through this page. The show is well known for parodying tons of speculative fiction tropes and films from the past.

In one episode, they actually parody the aforementioned Innerspace and combine it with... Jurassic Park.

Yes. Really.

Why am I trying to convince you this is real? Hell, you've probably seen this one.

But in case you haven't, here's how the episode goes down. Rick takes his grandson Morty, and the two of them shrink down and inject themselves into an old homeless guy in order to save the man from his bacteria.

Inside the man is "Anatomy Park," a theme park designed around the interior of the human body. Should the old man die, the park will be ruined. Of course, like a certain other theme park, everything breaks down, and the wild exhibits--viral and bacterial infections--come loose. Hilarity and adventure ensue.

You've probably seen this episode, too.

In the episode "Smart & Smarter," Maggie takes an IQ exam, and, according to the test, she has the highest IQ in the whole Simpson family--higher even than Lisa.

Lisa feels a sense of inferiority because of this, and runs off to the Museum of Natural History. Hijinks ensue, leading to the whole family being swallowed up by the human body exhibit, and being stuck there until Maggie figures out how to free them (or, rather, slams buttons until something works).

The episode is not educational, nor is it particularly insightful or imaginative with its utilization of the human body. But it does fulfill the requirements of this list, so it would be an oversight not to include it.

Everyone would get angry if I didn't say at least once "Simpsons did it!"

Three American comedies in a row. What are the odds?

In the episode "Emission Impossible," Stewie (the crazy little baby of the family) catches wind that his parents might want to make another baby.

Mad genius that he is, Stewie figures out a way to shrink down and enter his father, Peter. Once inside, he sets out to eradicate all of his father's sperm cells so he can no longer reproduce. However, once inside, he encounters a sperm cell who shares his desire for world domination.

This episode is yet another example of how so many of these shrinking stories, at one point or another, will travel down to the sex organs. It seems oddly inevitable that you end up linking sex with a bunch of people going inside another human being's fluid tracks, and--oh, that might be it right there...

The oldest film on this list--and perhaps the granddaddy of them all--this Richard Fleischer movie features shrinking inside another person's body... without it being treated as a joke.

In fact, the movie treats the shrinking inside another body with the utmost seriousness. A submarine crew is shrunk into a special sub that enters a human body to repair damage to an injured scientist's brain. Along the way, they have to traverse the dangers of the body, exploring the networks of organs by utilizing all their skills as underwater navigators... but there might be a danger from within their very crew.

Isaac Asimov himself wrote the novelization of the film. The film stars a lot of character actors from the 60s, though the one that most modern audiences would recognize is Donald Pleasence, most famous for playing Dr Loomis in the Halloween series and Blofeld in You Only Live Twice. In this, he plays a doctor who comes along for the trip who may or may not have some insidious motives for joining on the trip.

The film is a must-watch. It truly takes the idea of exploration seriously, and feels more like an episode of classic Star Trek than anything else.

Pixar keeps pumping out masterful animated films. From Toy Story to The Incredibles, they can do almost no wrong.

Still, who would have ever thought that one of their best films in recent memory would be about the inside of your brain?

Inside Out is the story about a young girl's emotional state going through puberty. While this sounds like a joke, it is actually an intense, emotionally enthralling journey of balancing childhood with growing up, with finding a balance between pessimism and optimism, and, on top of being a well-written, masterful piece of animation, also being a FUNNY well-written, masterful piece of animation.

It too takes the idea of going inside the human body seriously, but, unlike Fantastic Voyage, which took it seriously from a scientific, exploration perspective, this film takes it seriously from an emotionally involved perspective.

If you have not seen this movie yet, get on it. It is easily the best subject of this genre you are going to find.

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About the Creator

Anthony Gramuglia

Obsessive writer fueled by espresso and drive. Into speculative fiction, old books, and long walks. Follow me at twitter.com/AGramuglia

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