“Based on Jonathan Swift’s Immortal Tale.” So reads the lone words in the first cell of Paramount pictures 1939 film adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels. In a testament to the canonical nature of Swift’s work, this film was the second-ever cell-animated Technicolor feature film to be released. However, the plot and themes of the film, at no point square with the presumed intent of the original text. Writers Dan Gordon Cal Howard wrote this work to appeal to an audience who is vacuous to the nth degree.

This film is the first occasion in which Jonathan Swift’s biting satire was completely absent from a work bearing the name of Gulliver’s Travels in order to market the story to children. It is in this neutered format that I first encountered the character of Gulliver, as he journeyed to Lilliput, but no further, played wingman in a love story, and generally behaved in an upstanding manner, wholly refraining from urinating or defecating on anything. Profound social commentary reduced two a mindless static and ultimately pointless cartoon.

The transformation of such a momentous work into vapid drivel to be eaten up by the piglets of western civilization speaks volumes about the intention of cultural institutions to pacify society by tampering with cultural memory. Up until the moment that I began to read the original work, I truly believed that the vapid PG rendition claiming to be Gulliver’s Travels was true to Swift’s vision (as claimed in the opening cell of the film). It took fewer than three pages to discovered how profoundly wrong I was. The bulk of society has not and will never read a true version of Swift’s work, and as such, because of Paramount in 1939, Ted Dansen in 1996, Jack Black in 2012, and the many children’s versions of the book circulated in between those times, in the mind of the mass, Gulliver was a gentlemen, Brodignag, the Yahoos, and the Houyhnhnms never existed, and Swift was a mindless ninny, another victim of the culture industry.

Rant over.