This ’70s TV Movie Starring a Future Movie Superstar Turns 50 Today, and It Was Inspired by Two Real Boys

Fifty years ago today, November 12, 1976, a young John Travolta starred in an ABC television movie that was based on the real-life stories of two young boys. The Boy in the Plastic Bubble continues to generate discussion among viewers online even now, five decades later.

As Travolta’s IMDb page indicates, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble was one of the actor’s first movie roles. He was starring in Welcome Back, Kotter at the time, but he hadn’t risen to the level of international fame he gained after other roles he landed in the ’70s.

Before Travolta landed the role of Tod Lubitch and starred as Vinnie Barbarino on Welcome Back, Kotter, he’d had brief appearances on nostalgic shows such as Emergency! and Medical Center.

Little did anyone know while filming The Boy in the Plastic Bubble that Travolta was about to land his breakthrough role, playing Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. Soon after filming that movie, he followed it up with Grease. Travolta quickly went from landing TV movie roles to being a huge movie star, whose most recent project was The Gentleman Thief.

A synopsis of The Boy in the Plastic Bubble posted on Travolta’s website explains that Lubitch was “a normal teenage boy in every way but one. He was born without an active immune system. As a result, he must spend his life inside a plastic bubble that keeps him away from all germs, but also isolates him from other people.”

According to PBS, Travolta’s character was based on the short lives of David Vetter and Ted DeVita. The outlet noted that Vetter had an opportunity to watch Travolta’s movie and thought the spacesuit the character used during part of the film was “ridiculously unsterile.” Sadly, Vetter died at the age of 12.

Vetter was born with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID). The Cleveland Clinic shares that SCID continues to impact babies now, although it is a rare, genetic condition. Approximately 1 out of every 50,000 newborns are affected by SCID in the United States each year.

The website Finding Ted DeVita, maintained by DeVita’s brother, noted that Ted was diagnosed with aplastic anemia at the age of 9, in 1972. He died at 17, after living in a sterile room at the National Institutes of Health for over eight years.

Along with Travolta, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble starred The Brady Bunch family patriarch Robert Reed, notes IMDb. The cast also included Diana Hyland, who played the mother in the TV show Eight Is Enough, as well as the mother of Travolta’s character in the TV movie.

Travolta and Hyland fell in love while filming the movie together, despite the fact she was 18 years older than him. Sadly, the New York Post reported, she died of cancer in 1977, just months after The Boy in the Plastic Bubble aired.