Fantastic Journey Despite Confusing Start, ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ Offers Amazing Trip Through Literature

Lemuel Gulliver’s in bad shape.

For starters, he’s 72 feet tall, which can make getting around pretty touchy.

At the moment, that’s not really an issue, since hundreds of his fearful little hosts have pinioned him to the ground with scads of threads and needles. To them, of course, the tethers are stout ropes and spikes.

But Gulliver has another problem. He’s not really in the land of Lilliput, where the minuscule humans live. He’s actually lying on a table in his own house back in England, delusional. He remembers what happened in the past, as if it were happening now. He is confused.

You, too, may be confused as you watch the first minutes of “Gulliver’s Travels,” which begins tonight on NBC. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on. For instance, regular-sized people and teensy-weensy people appear around Gulliver in the same scene, as this extraordinary miniseries seeks to convey his derangement.

The startling cinematic achievement that allows them to do that may keep you fascinated until the confusion clears. But if it doesn’t, I COMMAND YOU TO KEEP WATCHING ANYWAY, as the emperor of Lilliput would say to Gulliver, in his imperious, if small, voice. This production is worth the initial effort. Once the confusion clears, “Gulliver’s Travels” races along like a schooner before the wind.

The emperor is played by Peter O’Toole, who is just one of the best actors in the whole wide world, and that gives you an inkling of the splendor of this fabulous rendition of Jonathan Swift’s tales. It could prove to be the best television show of the ‘95-‘96 season.

It’s certainly the costliest of this or any other season - $28 million, or $7 million per hour, according to executive producer Robert Halmi. Halmi’s “Scarlett,” the previous wallet-busting king, cost about $5 million per hour. A big-ticket dramatic series runs about $1.3 million per hour.

In his travels, Gulliver visits the strangest places, all different from the real world and designed by Swift to provide fodder for satirical content. Until now, it has been considered impossible to portray all the fantasylands on the screen.

But this “Gulliver’s Travels” does it. There is the flying island of Laputa, where everyone’s so busy thinking deep thoughts that nothing gets done.

We meet the gentle and intelligent talking horses whom Swift named Houyhnhnms. They populate a more evolved society than humans - represented by Yahoo apemen - have achieved.

Historical figures from Alexander the Great to Michelangelo pass through a sorcerer’s screen on one of Gulliver’s detours.

The tiny people of Lilliput plot endless battles against their enemies for reasons that almost no one can remember. (Wait till you find out what started the wars.) And the huge Brobdingnagians preside over an enlightened, if backward, agrarian society.

They are 72 feet tall, and in a scene that Kenworthy said could not have been filmed before 1995, their queen converses with a seemingly one-inch Gulliver, who is carried around on a tray.

The queen is played by two-time Emmy winner Alfre Woodard, an averagely distinguished actor in the pantheon of greats who populate this show. John Gielgud, Ned Beatty, Geraldine Chaplin, Omar Sharif, Phoebe Nicholls (“Brideshead Revisited”) and Edward Woodward (“The Equalizer”) join O’Toole and crowds of less famous British actors in the show. Gielgud has a cameo; the rest have substantial parts.

“Gulliver” stars newlyweds Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen (costume designer Shirley Russell made her wedding dress) as Gulliver and his wife, Mary. At first blush, it seems strange to set “Cheers’ ” Sam Malone adrift in this sea of great stars. But he works well.

Danson carries the show wonderfully, bending to peer curiously into the third-floor window of a Lilliputian palace, falling through a hole in the flying island, performing marvelous orations and demonstrations in Bethlehem Hospital, the insane asylum made famous by Swift as Bedlam.

In addition to substantial actors, the show has spectacular European locations, expansive photography, throngs of extras, astounding 18th-century costumes.

“Gulliver’s Travels” was written in 1726, and it presents a few problems for modern audiences, as legions of 20th-century students have learned firsthand. A scathing satire on just about every aspect of early 18th-century civilization, the book doesn’t have much of a plot.

Writer Simon Moore has taken care of that by creating a story in which Gulliver, returned from nine years of traveling (the book sends him on four separate journeys), is committed to Bedlam for his loony tales by an unscrupulous doctor. Gulliver’s wife, Mary, and son, Thomas, must fight to get him out.

The miniseries doesn’t take anything out. It just puts more stuff in. There’s still time for social commentary, much of it as fresh today as it was 270 years ago, which is, of course, the main reason “Gulliver’s Travels” has endured.

Though it may require a small battle to get into, this “Gulliver” accomplishes the astonishing feat of modernizing a classic for every audience without stripping away its essence.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: “Gulliver’s Travels” airs tonight and Monday at 9 p.m. on KHQ-Channel 6.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = By Jonathan Storm Philadelphia Inquirer