Discovery Channel - Great Books: Gulliver's Travels

Produced by: Discovery Communications

Genre: Documentary

Runtime: 50 min

The Great Books video series presented by the Discovery Channel introduces literary classics to students and readers, telling the stories with the help of clips from feature films and other dramatically acted scenes. Interviews with scholars provide information about the authors, the historical context in which the books were written, and comments on the texts. In Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift's famous satire (which is also an entertaining adventure story), Gulliver, a sailor, is blown overboard in a raging storm and washes up on the shore of Lilliput, a country where the people are only several inches tall. The Lilliputians respond defensively, since they see him as a giant, but Gulliver later receives the opposite treatment from the giant citizens of Brobdingnag. Experiences among intelligent horses (the Houyhnhnms) and on the flying island of Laputa are used to make ironic points about human nature and perspective. The program is narrated by Donald Sutherland.