“Hey, did these include ones for Gulliver?” “Are you going to get to Gulliver?” “Where’s Gulliver?” Right here, man.
Starting in October 1939, Paramount Sales News started to heavily promote the Fleischer animated feature, even devoting the whole cover of November 15, 1939 to it. I may go back and repost that issue in its entirety in the future as my photos of the whole thing are unpresentable. (I was shooting thousands of representative photos a day, you know…)
I like how they give the movie’s ciphers so much prominence that each of the spies get a panel. But, that’s a salesman’s job. Financial records on Gulliver Travels are thin, but they went into the new year (see Jan 03, 1940’s panel, and next week) promoting how well it was doing worldwide, something they wouldn’t do with a bomb.
And as every reader of this site well knows, Gulliver’s Travels is available on a fantastic Blu-Ray from Steve Stanchfield’s Thunderbean Animation. Definitely about time you ordered it if you haven’t by now.
October-December 1939 (Click to enlarge)
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01-03-1940
THAD KOMOROWSKI is a writer, journalist, film restorationist and author of the acclaimed (and recently revised) Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren & Stimpy Story. He blogs at 
Good to see some variety to the Promo art. Well, it certainly looks like they did promote Gulliver. And we know Mr. Bug never would have gotten made without Gullivers’ success, at least with children. The sad thing is that Mr. Bug is the superior animated feature, and yet it languishes, waiting for someone to give it the loving treatment Gulliver has had.
The Studio Ghibli DVD is very good, if you can get your hands on it. Not inexpensive though.
These are awesome! I like those rhyming descriptions of the characters.
“Gulliver’s Travels” has always been a problem novel for anyone who’s read it, with or without an eye toward adapting it to another medium. Ted Danson’s TV miniseries may have come closest, but still backed away from Swift’s bleak vision. In that light, Miyazaki’s “Laputa”–named for one of the places Gulliver visits in the book–was more on point in that the floating city was deserted when Pazu and Sheeta find it. I remember the Fleischer film, but the European war was such a dominant theme at the time that it colored the whole film, even though it started production a year before Hitler invaded Poland.
Gulliver’s Travels grossed a total of almost $3.3 million in the United States, giving Paramount a profit of at least $1 million.