The Adventures of Baron Munchausen in his eye, by the grand John Neville." Roger Ebert gave the film 3 out of 4 stars and found that it was "told with a cheerfulness and a light touch that never betray the time and money it took to create them", appreciating "the sly wit and satire that sneaks in here and there from director Terry Gilliam and his collaborators, who were mostly forged in the mill of "Monty Python"". While considering the film's special effects as "astonishing", Ebert also contended "the movie is slow to get off the ground" and "sometimes the movie fails on the basic
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