Max Fleischer's
Gulliver's Travels, has been a public domain staple for years, appearing on more VHS tapes, Beta tapes, LaserDiscs, and DVDs than any other animated feature film in history. The film is a personal favorite of mine, having first seen it on Winstar's 1999 VHS, and I love seeing it whenever I get the chance. A little background on the film,
Gulliver's Travels was the second animated feature ever made (and Paramount Pictures first animated feature) the first being Walt Disney's
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It was produced by Max Fleischer, who is most famous today for his creation of Betty Boop, his Popeye and Superman cartoons and his many innovations within the animation industry (including the invention of the Rotoscope, which was used to trace live action footage into animation).
Gulliver was produced at the then-new Fleischer studios in Miami, Florida (The Fleischers, as well as key staff members moved there from their New York studios to produce this feature), and the film was a box office hit, even leading to two Oscar nominations.
In 1968 the film went into, along with other Fleischer fare, the public domain, due to NTA (the film's rights holders since the 1957 reissue) not renewing the copyright. Thus the film started appearing on Super 8mm home movie prints, then VHS and Beta, LaserDiscs and finally DVD and Blu-ray. This tape, from Alpha Video Distributors, is one of the many churned out left and right from these low budget, fly-by-night companies who often took the cheapest and/or worst prints possible of classic films and dished them out onto the home video market, to unsuspecting consumers who thought they were getting a bargain, when in fact, they mostly got third generation, color faded, 16mm reissue dupes on a bad quality VHS tape. Such is the case for this sorry tape. My tape has several issues and is almost unplayable, it is the most damaged tape in my collection. Alpha would later reuse this transfer on their 2004 DVD.