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Gulliver's Travels Summary 54163 Views


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Description:

The adventures of Lemuel (yes, that is actually his name) will put your childhood "quests" to shame. But at least your sleepovers in the tree house didn't lead you to insanity. Or so we hope...

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Transcript

00:04

Gulliver's Travels, a la Shmoop I'm so glad you're here! I've been looking

00:10

for an audience for my vacation photos...

00:13

I always wanted to travel, so when business was slow, I shipped to sea with the navy...

00:18

I rarely make long stories short, but I'll do it just this once. The voyage was doomed

00:23

and I washed up on shore to find myself bodily restrained by little people.

00:27

No, that’s from my backpack tour across Europe…I mean really little people...fairy-sized

00:31

folks called the Lilliputians<<lily-poo-tee-ens>>.

00:33

I thought I was going out of my mind, but they were real, all right. They kept me for

00:37

a while as their prisoner, but eventually they succumbed to my charms…

00:41

…and even used me as a weapon of mass destruction in their war over boiled eggs. Don't ask.

00:46

However, when my Lilliputian enemies, who were small but nasty, plotted to blind and

00:51

starve me…

00:52

…I took an early check-out and sailed back home on a Gulliver-sized boat.

00:56

The problem was, home felt pretty tame after that. So I shipped out again, and this time

01:04

I was marooned in Brob-ding-nag, land of giants. …

01:11

It wasn’t so bad there, unless you count the animal attacks...

01:14

…evil court jesters...

01:15

… and being paraded around like a toddler at a beauty pageant.

01:19

It was almost a relief when that eagle carried me back out to sea. Boy, was I glad I invested

01:24

in that GPS…

01:28

When I got back this time, my wife strongly discouraged me from traveling again.

01:31

Out of respect for her wishes, I waited over a week before planning my next trip.

01:41

One pirate attack later, I was again on my own in a boat. Even worse, now I had to cancel

01:47

all my credit cards. Luckily, I was able to hitch a ride on the flying island of Laputa...

01:52

<La-poo-tah>

01:53

Laputa turned out to be full of real brainy types.  

01:57

Everyone was seriously boring, though, and a little...how shall I say it...eccentric?

02:06

I was antsy to get out of there, but I had a layover between voyages, so I opted for

02:11

a little excursion to visit the necromancers at Glubb-dub-drib. I had them conjure up a

02:16

bunch of dead Europeans, and a few other favorites...

02:20

One more sidebar to Lugg-nagg, land of the creepy old people who never die, and it was

02:26

back to the wife and kids, my darling little...what were their names again?

02:32

By now you know how this goes...I went off on another adventure, and wound up dumped

02:37

on a beach somewhere.  This time I ended up in a land where humans were ruled by their

02:42

horse overlords, the Houyhnhnms <win-Nims>.

02:48

The enslaved Homo Sapiens were called Yahoos… not named after the search engine.

02:56

I had a nice long chat with the Master Horse, and I told him all about my homeland.  He

03:00

didn't have much good to say about our nasty habits like war and greed, though.

03:05

In fact, the Houyhnhnms were pretty fabulous all around. I was so happy with them, I cried

03:12

when they asked me to leave.

03:14

But I found a ship, again, and went home to my yahoo wife and yahoo kids, again.

03:21

They don’t understand me like my horse buddies do.

03:24

So here I am, a homebody, stuck in Yahoo-land. The government wants directions to my ports

03:29

of call, so they can launch invasions…

03:31

…which is such a Yahoo thing to do.

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