The Adventures of Baron Munchausen they approached the person again when they were done, he was met with the reply, "I'm not gonna pay you, because I don't want to seem to be doing anything that could benefit Terry Gilliam." "Munchausen" is the third entry in Gilliam's ""Trilogy of Imagination"", preceded by "Time Bandits" (1981) and "Brazil" (1985). All are about the "craziness of our awkwardly ordered society and the desire to escape it through whatever means possible." Gilliam explains that, "The one theme that runs through all three of these pictures is a consistently serious battle between fantasy and what people perceive as reality."
Baron Munchausen similarly paradoxical story in which the Baron saves himself from being drowned in a swamp by pulling on his own hair. The same story also inspired the mathematical term "Munchausen number", coined by Daan van Berkel in 2009 to describe numbers whose digits, when raised to their own powers, can be added together to form the number itself (for example, 3435 = 3 + 4 + 3 + 5). Subclass ATU1889 of the Aarne–Thompson–Uther classification system, a standard index of folklore, was named "Münchhausen Tales" in tribute to the stories. In 1994, a main belt asteroid was named 14014 Münchhausen