Product Details

• Actors: Ned Beatty, Geraldine Chaplin, Ted Danson, Edward Fox, John Gielgud
• Directors: Charles Sturridge
• Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Special Edition, Widescreen
• Language: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Genius Products (TVN)
• DVD Release Date: September 9, 2008
• Run Time: 187 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B001AR0D22
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #14,658 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Gulliver's Travels is a brilliant satire and inventive fantasy that basically invented the idea of even-television. With ground-breaking special effects by Jim Henson Productions, Gulliver s Travels is the story of an 18th century physician who journeys are something of legend he towers over the tiny city of Lilliput, matches wits with a cunning sorcerer, and proves his mettle in a realm where horses rule and humans are beasts.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Immodest Production, October 19, 2008

By	Robert Carlberg (Seattle) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I recall being enormously impressed with this 2-part made-for-TV movie when it was first broadcast in 1996, and the intervening twelve years have not diminished it any. The production is fairly true to Swift's original, and contains many innovative and surprisingly-effective special effects (for the time). All of the cast members give boffo performances, particularly hammy Peter O'Toole in the role of a lifetime. But most impressive of all is the gentle and very sly interweaving of fantasy and insanity, where Lemuel Gulliver's state of mind continuously shifts between frames of reference both in size and veracity.

Swift's vulgar sense of humor is given free expression, and the biting satire of his political wit still rings familiar 270 years later. The film contains the free-wheeling giddiness of Terry Gilliam's "Time Bandits" (1981) and the time- and frame-of-reference-shifting vertigo of "Smoke Signals" (1998). Tiny details and thrown-away background elements make it a production for rewarding repeated viewing.

In short this is a film of Brobdingnagian proportions which has received Lilliputian acclaim. This is a gap of Yahooian injustice.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An outstanding rendering, January 7, 2009

By	wiredweird "wiredweird" (Earth, or somewhere nearby) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

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Johnathan Swift's beloved satire has amused readers for over 250 years, and shows no signs of waning. So many people have loved (or at least read) it, that it presents difficult target for movie-makers. No matter how they render it, they're sure to violate someone's image of the story. Despite a very few flaws, this version works remarkably well.

For one thing, it presents a reasonably complete telling of Lemuel Gulliver's story. I haven't read the original lately, but this seems to cover the entire tale, not just famous favorites like the visit to Lilliput. It also covers some of the moments that other versions skip, like putting out the Lilliputian palace fire. A parody of academic research holds up well, too, and might be even more relevant today than when Swift poked fun at the Royal Society's experimenters. Competent special effects make it easy to suspend disbelief for the film's duration.

Perhaps it's unfair, but the high points of this recreation work so well that the few low points seem even lower by contrast. The visit to Brobdingnag retains its political bite, buthis made-for-TV movie had to cut a few "adult" moments from Swift's version. The Struldbrugs really suffered at this director's hands, though. Perhaps there was some political correctness issue in toning their senility down, but that passage lost nearly all the impact of the original.

The good outweighs the bad, however, and the good includes some remarkable star power, including Omar Sharif, Peter O'Toole, and John Gielgud in brief but significant roles. The storytelling format works too, as flashbacks of story bubble up through Gulliver's damaged mind. This two-disc set is sure to brighten many rainy afternoons, as long as your younger viewers aren't skittish sorts.

-- wiredweird

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best adaptation to date, July 13, 2009

By	Trevor Willsmer (London, England) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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.