Plot Origin and Cultural Impact
The plot has parallels to events reported in news stories from April 1959, concerning a missing experimental Corona satellite capsule (Discoverer II) that inadvertently landed near Spitsbergen, situated in the Arctic Ocean, on April 13, which was believed to have been recovered by Soviet agents. In 2006, the USA National Reconnaissance Office declassified information stating that "an individual formerly possessing Corona access was the technical adviser to the movie" and admitted "the resemblance of the loss of the Discoverer II capsule, and its probable recovery by the Soviets" on Spitsbergen Island, to the book by Alistair MacLean.
The story has parallels with the Central Intelligence Agency's Operation Coldfeet, which took place in May–June 1962. In this operation, two American officers parachuted from a CIA-operated B‑17 Flying Fortress to an abandoned Soviet ice station. After searching the station, they were picked up three days later by the B-17 using the Fulton surface-to-air recovery system.
Reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, who had experience both as a movie producer and a defense contractor for the United States, is said to have watched a private print of Ice Station Zebra 150 times on a continuous loop in his private hotel suite during the years prior to his death.
The sets and miniature footage from the film were re-used for the 1971 ABC made-for-television movie Assault on the Wayne, starring Leonard Nimoy, Joseph Cotten, Keenan Wynn, William Windom, Sam Elliott, and Dewey Martin, which also featured Zebra cast members Lloyd Haynes and Ron Masak.
The name Zebra comes from the representation of the letter Z in the Joint Army/Navy phonetic alphabet. In the modern NATO phonetic alphabet later adopted by aviation and navigation, Zulu is being used instead of Zebra. In actuality, there was an Ice Station Alpha (phonetic for the letter "A") located on Ice Island T-3 in the Arctic, visited by the USS Skate on 14 August 1958, as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY).
Footage from Ice Station Zebra (and the model of the Tigerfish) was also re-used in the 1978 disaster film Gray Lady Down, the 1983 James Bond film Never Say Never Again, and the 1983 Cold War thriller Firefox.
Sportscaster Chris Berman, known for his whimsical nicknames for athletes, referred to major league pitcher Bob Sebra as "Ice Station Sebra".
An episode of Sealab 2021 has researchers in the Antarctic trapped on "Ice Station Zebra".
In the eleventh episode of the third season of Breaking Bad, Walter White hands Skyler a check from "Ice Station Zebra Associates". Ice Station Zebra is his attorney's fake company in the show (first mentioned in the eighth episode of the second season).
Read more about this topic: Ice Station Zebra
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