Gulliver's Travels

Hey kids! Wanna guess what movie we are doing next? Let me give you some hints. It is from the 1930’s, the main character is animated via rotoscoping, and all the comedy relief sidekicks are named after adjectives and/or voiced by Pinto Colvig. If you said Snow White, you are absolutely incorrect. I am talking about Fleischer Studios’ Gulliver’s Travels which should be more appropriately be called I Can’t Believe It’s Not Snow White as it has next to squat in common with the novel it is based on. As a little back story, this movie came out in 1939 and was produced in less than two years. That is an insanely short amount of time for an animated movie, even by today’s standards. Fleischer Studios wanted to get in on the Snow White craze ASAP, and boy does it show. The copyright for it expired and was never renewed so feel free to look it up on You Tube…if you dare.

Enough beating around the bush, and let’s get on to the review. The movie opens up appropriately enough with Gulliver. His boat is caught in a storm and gets wrecked. He barely makes it out alive and collapses on the beach. And this is the most action you are going to see him do for the first half of the movie. I wish I was exaggerating, but I am not.

We then cut to Lilliput. Here’s a fun little fact for you: there was originally eight Dwarfs. That’s right. And roughly two weeks before they met Snow White they decided they had enough of their eighth member, Gabby. After losing his job at the diamond mine, he was forced to take the position of the town crier for the Lilliputians. Okay so I just made that story up, but what is true is that Gabby is voiced by Pinto Colvig, a.k.a. the voice of Grumpy and Sleepy. That just shows how much effort Dave and Max Fleischer put into making this masterpiece.

Anywho, Gabby is walking along and stumbles across Gulliver’s seemingly lifeless body. Once he realizes he is standing on a “giant”, he high tails it back to King Little’s castle. Unfortunately for Gabby, King Little is in the middle of signing a wedding contract with King Bombo of Blefuscu. Little’s daughter Glory is madly in love with Bombo’s son David. As they are working out the wedding plans, the subject of what song to play comes up. Little wants to play a song called “Faithful” and Bombo wants a song called “Forever”. Since they can’t make up their minds, Bombo calls off the wedding and declares war. I guess they were just too stupid to realize that they could have just played both songs. Then again they would probably fight over who gets to play what song first.

As Bombo storms out of the castle with Prince David he talks to his three spies Sneak, Snoop, and Snitch. I am not really sure who is who. I am also not sure what they were doing out there in the first place. Was Bambo expecting to get into a fight or was he just a bad dude to begin with? This was never really explained. As Bombo gets into his carriage he starts flashing back to stuff that happened five minutes ago. He remains true to his word that a war is on the way even though he feels bad for breaking his son’s heart.

Back with King Little, he is mumbling to himself about the upcoming war and Gabby is trying to tell him about the giant on the beach. The scene goes like this:

Little: *mumble, mumble* War *mumble, mumble*

Gabby: There’s a giant on the beach!

Little: Put a sock in it, Gabby.

(Repeat x100)

Finally after Dopey Gabby suggests that the “giant” might be a spy from Bombo, Little finally listens and has Gabby gather up all of Lilliput to go to the beach. They don’t see Gulliver since they were standing on him. When they realized what they were standing on, they construct an elaborate pulley system to pick him up and bring him back to the king. The construction scene goes on for literally ten minutes in a not so very long movie.

I am not sure who this guy is, but I feel that he would have made a better comedy relief character than Gabby. 

Once in Lilliput, King Little gets the bejeezus scared out of him by the size of Gulliver, but the other Lilliputians look on in awe. They marvel at the size of his pocket watch, telescope, and gun. When the latter accidentally goes off, Gulliver wakes up. He seemed to be unfazed that he was surrounded by little people. Everyone runs for cover, but Gabby is unable to get back into the castle. 

Squish him, Gulliver. Squish him like the annoying bug that he is. 

His nonchalant wonder doesn’t last too long as King Bombo’s men started to attack. Once they lay eyes on Gulliver, they retreat. The Lilliputians realize that Gulliver is a friendly giant that will protect them from King Bombo. They celebrate by making him new clothes as they sing “Whistle While You Work” “Hap-Hap-Happy Day”.

Back at King Bombo’s castle, he sends his pigeon, Twinkletoes out with a letter to his spies back in Lilliput. The letter tells them that they must destroy that giant. They are confused on how to do it until the shortest one (again I don’t know who is who) suggests they steal Gulliver’s gun and use it against him.

Meanwhile the Lilliputians have a dinner party for Gulliver where they is a lot of singing and dancing. Yeah it was pretty much just pointless filler.

We should be thankful they chose this route instead of having 30 Lilliputians stacked up in a trench coat. 

The next morning Sneak, Snoop, and Snitch are loading the gun, when the short guy tells him that Gulliver is coming. They hide the gun and dowsed out the light as fast as possible. They get the ingenious idea of burying the lantern in hay. This in turn causes the house to catch on fire. Gulliver puts it out with some water. We should be thankful that he didn’t drop his drawers and pee it out like Jack Black did.

Later that night Gabby is in his room and he hears someone singing “Forever”. He knows that is King Bombo’s song so he calls the guards. It turns out it was just Prince David singing to Princess Glory (Bombo's son and Little's daughter since I know you completely forgot about them), but they have a sword fight nevertheless. It was a very pointless sword fight that went on for way too long and repeated the same unfunny gag where Gabby loses his sword roughly 147.8657 times. Gulliver shows up and takes the Prince and Princess away. Off screen they explain their situation on how they can’t get married. Gulliver gets the idea that the two should sing both of their songs together. Why no one thought of this in the first place is beyond me.

While this is going on, King Bombo and the spies were communicating back and forth with Twinkletoes. When Twinkletoes was taking a break, the demented Dopey from Hell shows up and reads the letter saying that King Bombo was attacking at dawn. The Lilliputians set out to defend themselves. They get Gulliver to join them. Meanwhile the spies kidnap Gabby for some reason. I shouldn’t really complain however. It is a good thing he is gone.

Down at the beach, Gulliver demands that King Little and King Bombo need to stop. He pulls Bambo’s ships in by their anchors. As he does that the baddies are loading his gun and ready to fire. Have no fear, as Prince David shows up in the nick of time to divert the bullet. But unfortunately he falls to his doom. As Gulliver lectures the two kings on how there stupidity caused them the death of David, he comes back to life. Everyone starts to sing a hybrid of “Faithful” and “Forever”. They build Gulliver a boat so he can ride off into the sunset.

The End

Side Note: This movie spun off a series of cartoons staring Gabby. They are also in the public domain so if you have some time to spare and don’t value your sanity look them up. I am not sure if there was a demand for these, or if Max and Dave Fleischer assumed that people wanted this just like they wanted Walt Disney to do a Dopey spin off. In either case I do remember my family having a couple of VHS tapes with public domain cartoons on them and there were at least a couple Gabby episodes. I am not sure if this is a false memory or not, but I remember kind of liking them because Gabby reminded me of Dopey. Also there were a shorter lived series starring Twinkletoes and the three spies. Not sure if they are in the public domain, but my hunch says that they are.

The Pros:

• I guess it wasn't as bad as I made it sound. It is okay for mindless entertainment. I honestly feel that most of this movies problems can be solved with one or two rewrites of the script. 
• Some of the music was pretty cool, especially at the end.

The Cons:

• The pacing is an absolute mess. The title character is unconscious for the first half of the movie, nearly one third of the movie is either the two kings planning the wedding or the Lilliputians moving Gulliver, so much pointless filler, etc
• The characters are weak. No one was fleshed out enough to make you want to care about them.
• If you thought the rotoscoping in Snow White looked dated and weird, you ain't seen nothing yet.
• It was obvious Fleischer Studios was working outside of their comfort zone. Paramount forced them to be like Disney instead of being themselves. I heard that originally this was going to be a feature length Popeye cartoon. That sounds a heck of a lot better than this.

I give it ** out of *****.