George Pal had wanted to do a film about Atlantis in the mid-1950s after reading a copy of the 1949 play "Atalanta, a Story of Atlantis" by Sir Gerald Hargreaves. Pal's studio at the time, Paramount, turned down the project.
George Pal was forced to begin production before the script had been polished due to an impending writers' strike. The strike occurred during production which stopped any rewrites.
Although the prior year's The Time Machine was a big hit for George Pal, MGM gave him a tiny budget for "Atlantis", hence the many shortened corners and reused elements. Russell Garcia, who scored the film, recycled themes from "The Time Machine" - even going so far as reusing entire cues from the earlier film. Additionally, 'William Tuttle', the makeup artist, had a considerable amount of blue body paint leftover from "Time Machine" as well: it may be noted that Neptune (who appears to Demetrios in a hallucination) is the same shade of blue as the Morlocks.
As well as the many clips from "Quo Vadis", this movie also utilised many of the sets and costumes from MGM's "The Prodigal" and "Kismet".
Azor's chambers include a few Krell gauges from Forbidden Planet
In addition to his credited narration, Paul Frees, without additional credit, dubbed the voices of three actors: An unknown appearing briefly as a messenger, and both Wolfe Barzell and Edgar Stehli, who played the fathers of the hero and heroine respectively.
One of the factors that led to MGM's green-lighting of this production was the recent success of the U.S. release of Pietro Francisci's Le fatiche di Ercole (US title: "Hercules"). This began the cycle of spectacle films about Greek and Roman mythological heroes.
Several shots from MGM's Quo Vadis, Paramount's The Naked Jungle and other films are used in this film.
The initial cut of this film featured men in DaVinci-inspired flying rigs. This sequence was cut due to the poor quality of the special effects and negative responses from preview audiences.
The large statue in the temple was from The Prodigal.
The mechanical style drawings of Atlantean machines in the priest's room resemble the drawings of Leonardo Da Vinci's inventions of the 15th century.
The special effects model of the Atlantean submarine has been part of the collection owned by Forrest J Ackerman for many years.
When a preview of this film was shown, a questionnaire was distributed among the viewers asking what scene they liked. One person answered, "The scene where Robert Taylor saved Deborah Kerr from the fire." This was in reference to the fact that much of the stock footage used in the film came from Quo Vadis.