Fox gets Jack Black to go on Travels

The more I read about the original story of Gulliver’s Travels — I have yet to read the original; bad former English major! — the more I realize that even with Jack Black at the helm as Gulliver, 20th Century Fox will probably ignore the more interesting of the tales to focus on just the giants and tiny people instead.

Variety reports that the entire project has been kept under wraps for a while because that’s just what Hollywood does when it’s trying to adapt a work that’s in the public domain. Fear of someone else jumping the gun and taking away their thunder, I assume. Rob Letterman (Shark Tale) has been signed to the project as its director for a while, but once they got Black, they’ve moved into high gear to get the production started in March 2009.

Most people already know that part of Gulliver’s Travels involves a big man traveling among tiny people and then his later adventure as a tiny man among giants. What rarely been seen on the big or small screens before is an adventure he has on a flying island called Laputa (calling all Miyazaki fans!) whose devotion to the pursuit of science is marred by the fact that they have no idea what to do with their inventions. The grade school student in me is instantly reminded of Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite, and thanks to how people used his invention destructively, also gave his name to the Nobel Peace Prize, among others.

The last of Gulliver’s travels is even more depressing, where when he is caught between a race of intelligent horses and somewhat less intelligent humans (who turn out to be not so dumb) he becomes so disillusioned by his encounters that he spends the rest of his life shunning humanity as a whole and speaking to his horses.

On second thought, the idea of Jack Black having an absurdist conversation with a horse doesn’t sound too terrible to me…