Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea the book from the initial concept is a portrait of Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Polish national hero, leader of the uprising against Russia in 1794, with an inscription in Latin: "Finis Poloniae!" ("The end of Poland!"). Margaret Drabble argues that "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" anticipated the ecology movement and shaped the French avant-garde. Theodore L. Thomas in 1961 said that "there is not a single bit of valid speculation" in the novel and that "none of its predictions has come true". He described the depictions of the diving gear, scenes, and the "Nautilus" as "pretty bad, behind the times
The Fabulous World of Jules Verne in which its heroes directly acknowledged their fondness for reading Verne. The second of Zeman's Verne-based films was "Vynález zkázy"; the later ones were "The Stolen Airship", based on "Two Years' Vacation", and "On the Comet", based on "Hector Servadac". The main literary source material for "Vynález zkázy" was Verne's 1896 novel "Facing the Flag". However, rather than a straightforward literal adaptation of the novel, Zeman conceived the film as if the story were being retold by one of its characters, the young engineer Simon Hart. Moreover, since "Facing the Flag" included many memorable Vernian motifs—including submarines, volcanoes, mysterious figures