The Adventures of Baron Munchausen The Adventures of Baron Munchausen The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a 1988 adventure fantasy film co-written and directed by Terry Gilliam, starring John Neville, Sarah Polley, Eric Idle, Jonathan Pryce, Oliver Reed, and Uma Thurman. The film is based on the tall tales about the 18th-century German nobleman Baron Munchausen and his wartime exploits against the Ottoman Empire. The film was a box office bomb, grossing just $8 million against its $46 million budget and losing the studio $38 million. However, it received positive reviews from critics and was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Art Direction, Best Costume
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