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Gulliver
$1.99
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Gulliver's Travels
$14.95
Despite its many faults, Hallmark's 1995 version of Gulliver's Travels is still the finest adaptation of Jonathan Swift's satirical classic - largely because it not only includes ALL of Gulliver's many travels but also includes the satire that's often overlooked. Unfortunately the twin problems of the book's highly episodic structure and a television budget (even a fairly lavish one) remain. The book is a somewhat rambling collection of traveller's tales moving simply from one surreal landscape to another, but Simon Moore's adaptation tries to impose some order on the chaos by providing a parallel plot that sees Gulliver returned to England clearly deeply traumatised and trying to prove his way out of the insane asylum where the rival for his wife's affections has had him committed. The England scenes at once mirror and comment on the travels, elements of which occasionally spill over into the real world. The trouble is that for the first hour or so it acts more as a distraction, constantly pulling you away from the story just as it starts to get interesting. The Lilliput scenes suffer worse here, with the feeling that the home scenes are too often designed to save them from filming the more expensive setpieces - this has to be the only version where we don't see Gulliver pulling the Blefescu fleet behind him.

Yet once Gulliver makes his escape, the tone becomes more consistent as he finds his situation reversed and himself the pet of the giants of the Utopians of Brobdingnag, a guest of the wise men of the floating island of Laputa who are so engrossed in science that they have no common sense left, the guest/prisoner of a historian who learns history directly from the source, offered immortality with all it's terrible consequences before finally finding a world he wants to belong if only he can convince the sublime talking horses the Houynhnhms that he's not an uncivilized Yahoo, each new destination convincing him of what an absurd and petty species humanity is. For the most part it's a darker set of Travels than expected, with only Gulliver's curiosity and commonsense and disappointment keeping it from plunging into irretrievable bleakness - and even this is offset by the scenes in the asylum where it becomes more obvious that even if he is telling the truth it may well have driven him genuinely insane. It's in these latter scenes that Ted Danson's Gulliver really shines, never more so than in an extraordinary speech where he turns his trial into a disappointed judgment on the whole human race.

Being made for television, the Yahoos are rather less literally scatological here than on the page, but for the most part this is a more adult treatment than you might expect with no real dumbing down. The star cast is certainly impressive, and for the most part well-used (if somewhat briefly in a few cases) - Mary Steenburgen, James Fox, Peter O'Toole, Edward Woodward, Omar Sharif, Shashi Kapoor, Edward Fox, Ned Beatty, Alfre Woodard, Kristin Scott Thomas and Isabelle Huppert among them. It's hard to imagine the upcoming Jack Black version even coming close to being a fraction as impressive as this.

Gulliver's Travels (Penguin Classics)
$8.00
Gulliver's Travels is the must read satire that echoes down the years. Swift brilliantly deployed (even invented) many great satirical devices such as messing about with scale, using exaggeration to hold a mirror to ugly human foibles and making the mores of his contemporary society look rediculous. Packed with quirky travellers tales, notes from 17th century sea travel, games, playfullness and proto sci-fi worlds, Gulliver's travels is a compendium of literary genius to last a lifetime.

Gulliver's Travels (Signet Classics)
$4.95
This is a highly intriguing story about a man who goes on many adventures to multiple different islands, each inhabited by a certian form of creature. The first island he arrives at has everything, except all of it is in miniture, including the people! on this island he is hailed as a powerful giant. This island is know as Lilliput. he escapes from Lilliput on a boat that washed up on the shore. The second island that he arrives on is populated by gigantic everything, trees,animals, people, and so forth. on this island he is captured and originnaly displayed for money and entertainment until he is bought by the queen. he escapes from this island in a miniture house that was made for him out of wood. this island was known as Brobdingnag. Once again, he journey to a distant island. this one is populated by people who are obsessed with music, math, and astromany. He leaves this island by way of a ship which takes him to Japan. His final voyage is to the land of the Houyhnhnms. This land is populated only by fully intelligent horses and creatures called Yahoos, which have many human aspects but have sharp claws and are somewhat violent. he takes his leave from this country with the help of the Houyhnhms, who aid him in making a canoe with a sail and paddle. That is a somewhat rough review of the main ideas of his journeys to multiple island on which he finds many strange things and learns multiple languages. I liked this book becauce of its sense of adventere and because of its many new, interesting ideas.