Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), officially Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships, is a novel by Jonathan Swift that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of the "travellers' tales" literary sub-genre. It is Swift's best known and most esteemed work, and a classic of English literature.
The book became tremendously popular as soon as it was published (Alexander Pope stated that "it is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery"), and it is likely that it has never been out of print since then.
The popularity of Gulliver is such that the term "Lilliputian" has entered many languages as an adjective meaning "small and delicate". There is even a brand of cigar called Lilliput which is, obviously, small. In addition to this there are a series of collectable model-houses known as "Lilliput Lane".
In like vein, the term "Yahoo" is often encountered as a synonym for ruffian or thug. "Brobdingnagian" appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as a synonym for 'very large' or 'gigantic'.
In the discipline of computer architecture, the terms big-endian and little-endian are used to describe two possible ways of laying out bytes in memory; see Endianness. One of the conflicts in the book is between Lilliputians who preferred cracking open their soft-boiled eggs from the little end, and Blefuscans who preferred the big end.
Allusions and references from other works
In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, the main character, Guy Montag, reads aloud a quotation from Gulliver's Travels. In the dystopian setting of Bradbury's novel, all books have been banned. The specific quotation - "It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end" - illustrates the novel's theme of nonconformity.
Science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein made his own comment by inverting the scenario in Starman Jones, where a stray spaceship lands on a planet where carnivorous horse-like creatures dominate all other fauna, including human-like creatures resembling Swift's Yahoos. Some readers consider these "horses" the story's clear villains; they not only butcher and eat humans (local and extraplanetary alike), but also practice euthanasia of old and weak members of their own species. Much of the plot is devoted to the Earth humans courageously fighting them.
In Alan Moore's two comic books The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Gulliver was the unofficial leader of an early incarnation of the League, alongside various others including The Scarlet Pimpernel, Dr. Syn and Fanny Hill.
Laputa inspired Isaac Asimov's story "Shah Guido G.", in which a future Earth is groaning under the tyranny of a flying city .
The Japanese animated film Castle in the Sky features a flying island called Laputa. Hayao Miyazaki has stated the name comes from Swift's book.
In the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, one of the B-52 bomber's target in Russia is a missile complex at 'Laputa'.
Laputa influenced L. Frank Baum's Isle of Phreex in John Dough and the Cherub and his Sky Island.
In the Nintendo game by Shigesato Itoi, MOTHER 2 (EarthBound in the US), the second "Your Santuary" is named Lilliput Steps. It is a series of extremely tiny footprints. Also, the first "Your Santuary" is named Giant Step, featuring a single huge footprint; it may be a reference to Brobdingnag's giants.
In Kingdom Hearts II at the Timeless River, a small area is called Lilliput, which is a very miniature town.
German composer Georg Philipp Telemann wrote a suite for two violins, the "Gulliver Suite." The five movements are "Intrada," "Chaconne of the Lilliputians," "Gigue of the Brobdingngians," "Daydreams of the Laputians and their attendant flappers," and "Loure of the well-mannered Houyhnhnms & Wild dance of the untamed Yahoos." Telemann wrote his suite in 1728, only two years after the publication of Swift's novel.
The Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy (1887-1938) wrote two novels in which a 20th-century Gulliver visits imaginary lands. One, Utazás Faremidóba (i.e. Voyage to Faremido), recounts a trip to a land with almost robot-like, metallic beings whose lives are ruled by science, not emotion, and who communicate through a language based on musical notes. The second, Capillaria, is a satirical comment on male-female relationships. It involves a trip by Gulliver to a world where all the intelligent beings are female, males being reduced to nothing more than their reproductive function.
Kazohinia is written by Sándor Szathmári, another Hungarian writer. Szathmári regarded Karinthy as his “spiritual father”. Kazohinia and Voyage to Faremido show many similarities: both describe beings that are not only capable to understand the secrets of Nature, but are manifestations of Nature themselves.
The novel The Return of the Antelope (by Willis Hall and Rowan Barnes-Murphy) and its sequel The Antelope Company at Large centre around the adventures of three Liliputian sailors shipwrecked in England. Return of the Antelope was subsequently made into a TV series by Granada Television.
The novel Mistress Masham's Repose by T. H. White features descendants of Liliputians that were captured and brought to England.
The comic book series Fables has a city called "Smalltown" which was founded by exiled Lilliputian soldiers. All small Fables (not just Lilliputians) have a tendency to refer to normal-sized people as "gullivers" or as being "gulliver-sized".
The character of Gulliver appears in the Doctor Who story The Mind Robber, played by Bernard Horsfall.
A parody of Gulliver occurs when Ben Stiller's character in Night at the Museum is tied down with ropes in the same style as Gulliver by 3 inch tall westerners.
Another parody of Gulliver occurs in Death Cab for Cutie's music video for their song Crooked Teeth, in which the main singer is tied down with ropes by small figures.
In the film Army of Darkness, a parody of the Lilliput scene when protagonist Ash Williams is tied down by miniature demons.
Sylvia Plath's 1962 poem "Gulliver" makes an allusion to the tale.
"A Voyage to Lilliput" was adapted for inclusion in Andrew Lang's Blue Fairy Book.
Davy King's 1978 short story "The Woman Gulliver Left Behind" is a sort of satirical feminist spin on the tale, telling it from the point of view of Gulliver's wife.
In John Myers Myers novel Silverlock, the protagonist, A. Clarence Shandon, encounters the Houyhnhnms and is dismissed by them as a Yahoo.
Larry Niven's Known Space ARM stories feature a character from a club of elderly people devoted to longevity called the Struldbrugs Club.
Soviet Ukrainian science fiction writer Vladimir Savchenko published Gulliver's Fifth Travel - The Travel of Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships to the Land of Tikitaks (Russian: Пятое путешествие Гулливера - Путешествие Лемюэля Гулливера, сначала хирурга, а потом капитана нескольких кораблей, в страну тикитаков) - a sequel to the original series in which Gulliver's role as a surgeon is more apparent. Tikitaks are people who inject the juice of a unique fruit to make their skin transparent, as they consider people with regular opaque skin secretive and ugly.
Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
Gulliver's Travels has been adapted several times for film and television:
* Le Voyage de Gulliver à Lilliput et chez les géants (1902): A French short silent adaptation directed by Georges Méliès.
* The New Gulliver (1935): Russian film by Aleksandr Ptushko about a Soviet schoolboy who dreams about ending up in Lilliput. Notable for its intricate puppetry and a decidedly strange twisting of Swift's tale in favor of Communist ideas. This was the first film to contain stop motion animation in nearly its entire running time.
* Gulliver's Travels (1939): animated feature produced by Fleischer Studios and Paramount Pictures as a response to the success of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, directed by Dave Fleischer. The film is generally considered one of the best from The Golden Age of Hollywood animation, although it varies widely from the original novel. Fleischer used the rotoscope to animate the character of Gulliver, tracing from footage of a live actor. The film was a moderate success, and its Lilliputian characters appeared in their own cartoon short subjects. With the expiration of its copyright, this film has entered the public domain, and can be downloaded at no charge from the Prelinger Archive. 
* The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960): The first live action adaptation of Gulliver's Travels, but also incorporating the stop motion animation of Ray Harryhausen. It was directed by Jack Sher and starred Kerwin Mathews.
* The Adventures of Gulliver (1968): This animated series was directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Young Gary Gulliver, voiced by Jerry Dexter, searches for his missing father in the land of Lilliput.
* Gulliver's Travels (1977): Live action/animated musical film directed by Peter R. Hunt and starring Richard Harris featuring the Lilliput voyage only.
* Gulliver's Travels (1979) : Animated cartoon made in Australia that was seen on Famous Classic Tales on CBS. It starred Ross Martin as Lemuel Gulliver and features two voyages.
* Gulliver's Travels (1992): Animated television series starring the voice of Terrence Scammell.
* Gulliver's Travels (1996): Live-action television mini-series starring Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen. In this version Dr. Gulliver has returned to his family from a long absence. The action shifts back and forth between flashbacks of his travels and the present where he is telling the story of his travel and has been committed to an asylum. It is notable for being one of the very few adaptations to feature all four voyages, and is considered the closest adaptation to the book, despite taking several liberties.
* Arpudha Theevu (2007) Tamil Movie based upon Gulliver's Travels, features Prithviraj and Mallika Kapoor in the prominent roles besides 300 dwarfs all through the movie.
The adaptation in 1939 (which is above)
Gulliver's Travels is a 1939 cel-animated Technicolor feature film, directed by Dave Fleischer and produced by Max Fleischer for Fleischer Studios. The film was released during the holiday season of 1939 by Paramount Pictures, who had the feature produced as an answer to the success of Walt Disney's huge box-office hit Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Gulliver was the tenth animated feature film ever released, and the first produced by an American studio other than Walt Disney Productions. The story is based upon the Lilliputian adventures of Gulliver depicted in Jonathan Swift's 18th century novel Gulliver's Travels.
Max and Dave Fleischer had no intentions of producing a full-length feature film until Paramount, who distributed Fleischer's Popeye, Betty Boop, and Screen Songs cartoon shorts, approached him with the idea. Paramount offered to build the New York City-based Fleischers a new state-of-the-art animation studio in Miami Beach, Florida, away from the union influence which had polarized the Fleischer Studio after a bitter 1937 labor strike. The Fleischers agreed, and began development on Gulliver's Travels in spring 1938 as construction began on the Miami studio. The Miami Fleischer Studio opened in fall 1938, and the Fleischer staff moved their production headquarters there. A few individuals, including voice actor Mae Questel, opted to remain in New York and did not follow the Fleischers to Miami.
Paramount wanted Gulliver ready for a Christmas 1939 release, meaning that the film would have to be produced on a timetable that was one-third of that for the production of Disney's Snow White. To meet this deadline, the Fleischer staff was greatly expanded, to the point that the once-spacious new building was overcrowded with employees. Local Miami art schools provided graduates to be trained as ink-and-paint artists and inbetweeners. Animators were lured from the Hollywood animation studios, including Cal Howard and Tedd Pierce from the Schlesinger studio, and former Fleischer employees Grim Natwick, Al Eugster, and James Culhane, who had all migrated over to the Disney studio. Factions developed between the East and West Coast animators, who were unaccustomed to each-others' habits. The two sides grew further apart after Howard, Pierce, and the other Hollywood storymen decided to discard the New York regime's storyboards, crafting the film's plot over again from scratch.
Rotoscoping, an animation technique originally developed by the Fleischer Studios, was used throughout Gulliver's Travels to animate Gulliver. The process involves tracing live-action footage frame-by-frame; Sam Parker, the actor who performed the voice of Gulliver, also modeled as the character's live-action reference. Popeye the Sailor had originally been planned to "portray" Gulliver, but these plans were scrapped during pre-production.
Songs in the film include "All's Well", "It's a Hap-Hap-Happy Day", and "Faithful Forever", all of which later became standards of Fleischer cartoon scores. The film was spun off into two short-lived Fleischer cartoon short series: the Gabby cartoons starring the Pinto Colvig-voiced Lilliputian sidekick of the film, and the Sneak, Snoop and Snitch (Animated Antics) cartoons starring the three villains from the film.
Like Snow White before it, Gulliver was a box-office success, and led to the production of another Fleischer/Paramount feature, Mister Bug Goes to Town. However, business-related problems which arose during the production of Mister Bug would result in Paramount's absorption of the Fleischer Studio in 1941. Gulliver's Travels is now in the public domain, and is widely available on home video and DVD.
* Barrier, Michael (1999). Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-516729-5.
* Maltin, Leonard (1980, updated 1987). Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-452-25993-2.