Did You Know?

Patrick McGoohan was filming his famous TV series The Prisoner at the time he appeared in this movie. In order to allow him to take time off from his TV series, the episode "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling" was written in which McGoohan's character, Number Six, has his mind transferred into the body of another man. "The Girl Who Was Death" was also altered so that No 6 wore a Sherlock Holmes disguise, so that his double Frank Maher could film a lot of the scenes.

In the era before VCRs, Howard Hughes would call the Las Vegas TV station he owned and order them to run a particular movie. Hughes so loved this that it aired on his Las Vegas station over 100 times.

This was Rock Hudson's favourite film of his own.

Average Shot Length (ASL) = 7 seconds

Charlton Heston was originally offered the role of Ferraday but turned it down, saying there was no characterization in the script. Gregory Peck was then offered the part and early adverts in Variety magazine carried mention of Peck's casting, together with Laurence Harvey as Jones.

This movie was made and released about five years after its source novel of the same name by Alistair MacLean was first published in 1963. "Ice Station Zebra" was MacLean's tenth novel and this movie was the fourth filmed adaptation of one of MacLean's stories. This film was also released in the same year (1968) that MacLean's novel "Force 10 From Navarone" was first published as well as another MacLean filmed adaptation, Where Eagles Dare. The "Ice Station Zebra" novel was the last of 'Maclean's novels to be written in the first-person narrative. Author Alistair MacLean took a sabbatical from writing for three years after he finished penning the novel "Ice Station Zebra" in 1963. MacLean's next book after "Ice Station Zebra" would be "When Eight Bells Toll", first published in 1966.

One of two filmed Alistair MacLean adaptations directed by John Sturges. The other was The Satan Bug made and released about three years earlier.

When a new screenplay was written for this movie, the original cast could not do the film anymore due to scheduling conflicts, so they were replaced with a new lead cast.

This picture is the first of two movies based on an Alistair MacLean novel set in rugged icy and snowy terrain. The second would be Bear Island about eleven years later.

Miniature footage and film sets from this picture were re-used in the tele-movie Assault on the Wayne which also co-starred two members of this movie's cast, Ron Masak and Lloyd Haynes. Footage from the movie, particularly the Tigerfish submarine model, was also re-used for the films Firefox, Gray Lady Down and Never Say Never Again.

The movie's plot has similarities with the real life 1962 CIA Project COLDFEET aka Operation Coldfeet. Conducted in May and June of that year, the assignment purpose was to gather intelligence from an abandoned Soviet arctic research ice station. Two agents parachuted from a B-17 Flying Fortress and searched the facility and were collected three days later via the Fulton surface-to-air recovery system.

In real life, there was no "Ice Station Zebra", but there was an "Ice Station Alpha" which was situated in the Arctic's Ice Island T-3, "Alpha" being derivative of the letter "A" in the phonetic alphabet of the Army and Navy. In the International Geophysical Year (IGY), "Ice Station Alpha" was visited by the USS Skate in August 1958.

The band 'Silkworm' named a song "Ice Station Zebra" which is featured on their 1997 album "Developer".

In one scene Pat McGoohan was supposed to dive into the flooded torpedo room of the nuclear sub to rescue a trapped naval officer. Being a strong swimmer he insisted on doing the scene himself rather than use a stuntman. A change was made to the script so allowing Olympic swimming champion Murray Rose, who'd been cast in another role, to do the scene with him in case anything happened. It was only after the scene was completed that Murray revealed that while he and Pat were standing up to their necks in the rising water just before the cameras rolled Pat had whispered to him "Now I've done it, my foot's stuck". Murray dived down and freed his foot which had become wedged tight in the torpedo rack.

One of two Alistair MacLean filmed adaptations released in 1968, the other was Where Eagles Dare.