Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
alt title(s): Pirates
Howard Pyle: pirates with prisoners. (Type 1. Definitely Type 1)
Yar, har, fiddle-de-dee Being a Pirate is all right to be Do what you want 'cause a Pirate is free You are a Pirate! — LazyTown, "You Are a Pirate"
Terrorizing suckers on the seven seas And if you've got beef - you'll get capped in the knees We got sixteen men on a dead man's chest And I shot those suckers and I'll shoot the rest — The Beastie Boys, "Rhymin' and Stealin'"
Dashing villains who lived free on the open sea, with a parrot on each shoulder and a chest full of gold. Fond of drinking and prone to fights, out to live "a short life and a merry one." The pirates we know and love were greatly influenced by those of Peter Pan and Treasure Island.
- Type 1: Some pirates are major threats whenever they appear. Seeing the Jolly Roger on the horizon is bad news for the dashing, clean-cut heroes, who will soon have to deal with a wave of unwashed brutes intent on looting as much as they can, killing the crew, and... ahem..."abducting" the women. Generally the easy go-to bad guys for anything in The Cavalier Years.
These pirates are pure evil. They have, in fact, thoroughly earned their Real Life designation hostis humani generis or "enemy of all mankind".
- Type 2: Pirates featured as dashing romantic heroes and rebels, ranging from the rather goofy to the total rebel; generally, they follow a code of honor. Frequently featured as The Pirates Who Dont Do Anything to prevent their romantic aura being tainted by them harming innocents. The Romantics were fond of this trope, as in Lord Byron's The Corsair. It appeared in Gilbert And Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance with pirates who can not oppress an orphan (and swallow any and all claims to be an orphan) and are easily overcome by appealing to their loyalty to Queen Victoria.
In Real Life, a blurry line separated this type of pirate from privateers. The Spanish viewed Sir Francis Drake as a pirate, and the British, John Paul Jones.
Both types are among the Oldest Ones In The Book, and can, indeed, be found in the same works.
Mostly, they can be found in the Caribbean, a few hundred years ago, but any sea-faring hero can expect to meet pirates at least once, and they also occur in the far future, sailing the ocean of space.
Elizabethan-era privateers (such as the aforementioned Sir Francis Drake) used to be quite popular but have fallen out of favour in recent decades.
Pirate tropes include:
Space Pirates throw people out of the airlock rather than making them Walk The Plank, and may substitute some alien flier for the parrot.
Sky Pirates have flying ships but otherwise resemble the standard Pirate.
If the pirates are mixed up with the occult, expect voodoo, zombies and/or skeletons (sometimes including the pirates themselves), and cursed treasure.
Not to be confused with real pirates. Were you attacked by pirates around the 1700s, the 'nicest' you could hope for would probably lean towards Type 2 - they would steal your things but might not harm you. Modern day piracy is less covered in fiction, with the 1979 Soviet film Piraty XX veka (Pirates of the 20th Century, one of the first real Soviet "action" films) and the Japanese anime Black Lagoon being some of the few rare examples of the opposite. So far, the pirates currently active off the coast of Somalia have been interested in money, not lives (indeed, their "business model" is based on extorting ransom from the shipping companies), but the entire meme of pirates is in danger of becoming a huge Funny Aneurysm Moment these days.
Note that in fiction, many Pirate Captains are presented as absolute masters of their ship, with The Mutiny being regarded as fully as serious as on merchant or naval ships. In Real Life, the captain had command only in battle; out of battle, he could be freely deposed — and often marooned — for incompetence.
For some reason, there's a running joke about them being the arch-enemies of Ninjas.
The Jolly Roger, the stereotypical pirate flag, is often used to indicate that you're dealing with pirates. In Real Life, however, it meant that the pirates would accept prisoners; a blood-red flag was the indicator that these pirates would kill anyone and anything. There were many different variants of Jolly Roger, with some pirates using just plain black flags; this is seen to an extent in One Piece, where each pirate ship has a different Jolly Roger. Note that the pirates would often fly false colors or no colors until they were close enough to their intended victims, then switch to their flag.
Honored every September 19th with International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Reading/watching/playing any of the below works, at least in p arrrt, would be a good way to celebrate.
Subtrope:
Examples
Anime
- One Piece: Type 1 for some of the villains, but easily type 2 for the Straw Hats.
- In earlier depictions of One Piece (Romance Dawn and Wanted one-shots), pirates are described as being of two types: The "Morganeers", who are all about pillaging and looting, and the "Peace Mains", who are more about fun and games and beating the Morganeers for their loot.
- Oda intentionally avoided using those terms in the regular series, feeling they were a bit too on the nose. Although most One Piece pirates fall into one category or another early on, as the series progresses things get a bit more gray and some pirates straddled the moral line(although the Strawhats remain staunchly in the second category.)
- The Strawhats are SO type two that they're never even shown (successfully) stealing loot. Lampshaded in the Skypeia arc, when they tried to steal a bag of gold...except that the owners of said gold had just decided to give it to them as a reward.
- The exception to this rule is Nami, a rather shameless and highly skilled thief and con artist.
- Space pirate example: Captain Harlock, a Loveable Rogue space pirate who has appeared in any number of the works of Leiji Matsumoto.
- The manga Crossbone Gundam has the main characters from Gundam F91 opposing the Jupiter Empire under the guise of space pirates, right down to their ship's design and the captain having a parrot.
- It gets even crazier. The titular Gundam has X-shaped thrusters (though they're actually practical), a beam cutlass and daggers instead of the standard saber, a beam gun shaped like a flintlock pistol, a targeting lens shaped like an eye patch and an extra antenna on its head modeled after a feather. Apparently just sporting the Jolly Roger insignia on its forehead wasn't enough for Hajime Katoki.
- The main cast of Black Lagoon are an example of your average modern-day South-East Asian variety of pirate, and prefer AKs and pistols to swords and cutlasses.
- Kyouran Kazoku Nikki's tenth episode is 21 minutes of pirate absurdity. This on top of the normal absurdity the show already has. Interestingly, the episode is about the differing ideals of shows like One Piece where the lead pirates don't do anything and the traditional view. The traditional view wins.
- The main Big Bad of the ninth Pokemon movie, Pokemon Ranger and the Temple of the Sea, was a pirate, complete with a Chatot, a parrot Pokemon.
- First episode of Slayers REVOLUTION has Lina Inverse laying waste to a group of pirates.
- Chosokabe Motochika/Arslan in Sengoku Basara/Devil Kings.
- Castle in the Sky has, of course, Sky Pirates. They fall more under the second variety—they readily kidnap and steal, but actively assist two innocent children.
- Mugen's backstory in Samurai Champloo features a group of pirates.
Comic Books
- Y: The Last Man - Because of the shortage of food and medicine caused by the plague the Australian navy has turned to piracy – one of their spies even has an eyepatch. It later turns out that the Australians are actually trying to stop the pirates who are taking all the food in exchange for heroin.
- El Cazador was comic book from Cross Gen. In the opening issue, the ship carrying Spanish noblewoman Donessa Cinzia Elena Marie Esperanza Diego-Luis Hidalgo and others of her family is attacked by pirate captain Blackjack Tom. The Donessa is one of the few survivors of the attack. She swears to hunt down Tom and rescue his prisoners. To accomplish this, she re-names her ship El Cazador ("The Hunter") and becomes a pirate herself, dubbed "Lady Sin" by her crew. The remaining issues of the series detail the beginnings of Lady Sin's quest as she forsakes her privileged past for life on the high seas.
- Captain Hawk, a.ka.a. 'the Sea Snake', was a fairly treacherous sometimes-ally of Travis Morgan in The Warlord.
- The comic book Starslayer was this trope to a T, being Space Pirates in a Space Opera setting.
- "The Phantom " feature The Phantom's arch-rivals, The Singh Brotherhood, a criminal organisation that used to be pirates. Nowadays they are landlubbers who work with more "modern" crimes like drug-dealing, blackmailing and kidnaping.
- In "Watchmen", Since superheroes exist people don't bother reading about them in comics, so instead pirate comics are popular.
- Tintin album "The Treasure of Rackham the Red" features Type 1 pirates in the flashbacks to Captain Haddock's 17th century ancestor.
Film
- Treasure Island — The 1950 Walt Disney movie version of this featured British Actor Robert Newton as Long John Silver. His wildly over the top performance as the ragged, full-bearded, wild-eyed, sinister but charismatic pirate leader was purely his own creation and quite unlike the actor himself (He had been considered for the role of the role of the handsome, brooding Heathcliffe in the 1939 version of Wuthering Heights, narrowly losing out to Lawrence Olivier.) His distinctive Argggh growl and English West Country accent have been imitated by, literally, hundreds of millions of people over the decades. It is unlikely that any line of recorded cinema can match its popularity.
(Given that Robert Louis Stevenson was in the West country for his health and used two pubs in Bristol as models for those in Treasure Island and given the distinctive 'arrr' local accent, Robert Newton wasn't that far from the truth)
- In 1990 the TNT cable network produced a 4 hour TV movie of Treasure Island which cleaved to the book with Charlton Heston's Long John Silver the clever but ruthless rogue of the book and Christian Bale's Jim Hawking a tough, worldly kid. It was made in Cornwall,England and Jamaica and its fantastic!
- Muppet Treasure Island is...well, the above but with muppets. While the original plot's obviously been mucked around with quite a lot, they play a lot of the dramatic moments completely straight. "Shiver My Timbers" is an especially chilling song, given the film.
- And, based on Treasure Island, is Treasure Planet. In Space!
- Pirates Of The Caribbean — Captain Jack Sparrow was apparently originally written as a fairly strait-laced character. Until Johnny Depp decided he was going to chuck Keith Richards into his portrayal.
- Barbossa even has the accent, lampshaded in the third movie.
- Blackbeard's Ghost, in which modern-day Dean Jones learns that the famous pirate Blackbeard was cursed to forever remain a ghost unless he could perform a single selfless act. Being a Disney movie, hilarity ensues until the predictable ending.
- Pirates, starring Walter Matthau, in which the trope is taken to the other end of the spectrum (i.e., the whole lot is dirty, vile, etc.) for comedic effect.
- The Pirate Movie, starring Kristy MacNichol, which was a (very) loose adaptation of The Pirates of Penzance.
- And the film adaption, Pirates of Penzance which played it straight. Well, as straight as anything based on Gilbert And Sullivan could be.
- Yellowbeard. The title character is a Type 1 pirate if ever there was one.
- The Crimson Pirate Burt Lancaster has fun playing a Type 2.
- The Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride. He's a Type 1: he never takes prisoners, always killing everyone aboard the ships he captures. Well, except for one.
- That's what everyone thinks, anyway. "Takes no prisoners" does not mean "kills everyone." It means "if you resist, you're dead, but otherwise we'll just take your stuff and leave." Roberts cultivated the reputation so that no one would resist having their stuff taken. It helps that no actual piracy is shown, and the only pirate in the movie is the current Roberts.
- In Stardust, we meet a group of Sky Pirates. Led by a Camp Gay Robert De Niro.
- They seem to be pirates only in name, the only thing we see them do is carry passengers, harvest lightning, and sell it. They mostly just seem to entertain themselves by going "ARRRG!" a lot.
- Note that in the book, they weren't pirates.
- In the movie, at least, they don't do any piracy, but they do do some smuggling. Which is also illegal, but perfectly safe to put on the silver screen.
- "Bully" Hayes in Nate and Hayes gives what might well be the core creed of the Type 2 pirate:
Hayes: Are you saying in that book that I'm a pirate?
Clerk(hesitantly): I suppose I am
Hayes: Good. Because I am one, and a damn good one. Oh, I never flew the skull and crossbones, that's for your fictioneers. But I have sought pleasure and profit in every port known to man without regard to any man's law. That's not to say I lack morals and standards. I got morals and standards. I never killed a man who didn't deserve it, I never cheated an honest man, I never pillaged and I never raped.
- The Goonies, anyone? One-Eyed Willie certainly counts as Type-1!
Literature
- Peter Pan
- Lord Byron's The Corsair
- Captain Blood, both as a novel and as the movie in which Errol Flynn first starred.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs's Pirates of Venus, Tanar of Pellucidar, and Tarzan at the Earth's Core; also the black pirates of The Gods of Mars.
- Conan The Barbarian has been a pirate more than once in his career. In addition to his membership in the Red Brotherhood, he has also captained several ships as well as being the lover and right hand of Belit, the Queen of the Black Coast, in the story of the same name.
- Andre Norton's Scarface (historical) and the Jacks (space pirates) in many of her science fiction novels.
- The Pyrates — comic novel archly highlighting all the pirate tropes.
- Douglas Morgan's Tiger Cruise takes the modern route, and depicts a Navy destroyer beset by a typhoon and a well-equipped band of Indonesian pirates. They don't fit any of the typical traits of type-1, but they're definitely not type 2.
- In Poul Anderson and Gordon R Dickson's Hoka stories, some of them decide to be Pirates! When Alex Jones foils their plot to loot a city, the mayor suggests that actually, they think it would be kind of fun. Of course, being Hokas, they agree to give back their plunder after they loot the city. (What do you take them for, thieves?) And the looting of the city becomes an annual event.
- Many, many of Emilio Salgari's books. The Black Corsair series, the Pirates of Malaysia series, the Pirates of Bermuda series... and the list goes on.
- Vampirates
- In Forgotten Realms novels, as usual, all variants are represented — including Type 1, Type 2 and Chaotic Neutral pirates. One of latter captains, among other achievements, was given "elf-friend" status, got imprisoned for debauch in Wretched Hive sort of port where tavern brawls are so common normally no one gives a damn and essentially adopted drow mage (and Lolth priestess) as a daughter. There's also group named 'Wolves of the Waves'... and it's quite definitely not a metaphor.
- In Patricia A Mc Killip's The Bell At Sealey Head, Dalia wants Gwyneth to write about pirates. When Raven objects that pirates are uncouth and wouldn't know what to do with tea — probably use the teapot to drink rum — Dalia objects that she wants nice pirates who were driven to it and would be glad to give it up.
- The Takers, a Two Fisted Tale by Jerry Ahern, has the protagonists having to battle the modern-day version when the owner of the yacht they chartered plans to get rid of it in an insurance scam. Which would be made more authentic by their deaths.
- In Nick Kyme's Warhammer 40000 Salamanders novel Salamander, the Hanging Separately between the Salamander and the Marines Malevolent culminates in the discovery that the Marines are out to resupply themselves from a Mechanicus delerict. Or loot it, as the Salamanders put it, accusing them of being pirates.
- In Over The Wine Dark Sea these are a recurring peril . Most of the Mediterranean is in constant war and the Rhodian Navy can only handle so much.
- Stationery Voyagers has the very Type 1-ish Yehtzig Pirate League, who take Always Chaotic Evil to extremes. They not only rape and pillage, they also take over the drug trades of entire worlds, establish candy factories as drug fronts, hijack educational curricula, spread infertility viruses to wipe out Stationery types they don't like, and try to collapse entire societies by forcing women to have more out-of-wedlock births than they can financially sustain. They don't always rape directly, but will shoot men and women with darts that basically contain weaponized Viagra. And for those religious idealists who continue to stand in the way...a good bullet almost always seems to do the trick. Oh yeah...they also consider themselves kinda-sort-of a devil-worshipping cult as well.
- Gideon Dafoe's The Pirates! In an Adventure With... series, featuring the Pirate Captain and his crew (none of whom are named, only given descriptions such as the Pirate with a Scarf) having wacky misadventures with famous historical figures including Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Napoleon Bonaparte. They are portrayed as somewhat lecherous and violent, but generally good-hearted.
- 'The Thirteen And A Half Lives Of Captain Bluebear'' contains Minipirates; 4- foot tall pirates born with eye-patches, hook hands and peg legs, who would be the scourge of the seas, if they were big enough for anyone to notice them.
Live Action TV
- In the LazyTown episode that the page quote comes from, the children have been playing type 2-ish pirates, and are shown a history book that tells them about Rottenbeard, a type 1 pirate who once victimised LazyTown and stole a corner of a stone containing a message from the town's founder, then was driven off by a hero who bears a suspicious resemblance to both Sportacus and a ninja. Despite him being type 1, the kids are impressed, so Robbie decides to take advantage of the kids' pirate fever by dressing as Rottenbeard and getting them to 'help' him look for the missing corner, which he has made a mock-up of that makes the message say "LazyTown should always be lazy".
- Fred Perry, author of the comic Gold Digger, actually made a short animation sketch of the first part of said episode's song, featuring his Voltron Pirate Ninja Leprechaun characters. Apparently, he actually bought the rights to do it legally, despite it being a test animation, and yes that's a ninja doing pelvic thrusts with a katana/shovel strapped to his crotch.
- Doctor Who, episodes "The Smugglers", "Enlightenment," and, of course, "The Pirate Planet," as well as the novels "The Resurrection Casket" and "The Pirate Loop".
- A couple of non-traditional space pirates were the Monster Of The Week in the Firefly episode "Our Mrs. Reynolds."
- On SpikeTV's Deadliest Warrior, they had a Caribbean pirate fight one-on-one against a French knight. The pirate manages to defeat the knight with his superior firepower.
- There was a pretty faithful version of Treasure Island on British TV in either the late '70s or early '80s. The theme song was an extended version of Sixteen men on the Dead Man's Chest, including the lines "No more of the crew were left alive, that put to sea with seventy-five".
- Also on British TV in the '80s was Long John Silver's Return to Treasure Island, which with modern sensibilities, contrasted "evil" Silver, who looted and pillaged with "good guy" Trelawney who owned a whole plantation full of slaves. Better yet, silver was played by the largest Large Ham of them all, BRIAN BLESSED. Shiver Me Timbers!
- In 1990 a TV movie was aired staring Charlton Heston as Long John and Christian Bale as Jim Hawkins. This troper considers it the best and most faithful adaption of the RLS novel ever!
Music
- Emilie Autumn has always had one pirate captain since the first Asylum tour in 2007. The first was Captain Vecona who was also the Asylum semstress and left the Bloody Crumpets after the first 2008 tour. The second was Captain Maggot who took over in fall 2008, she appears to be far more popular of a captain owing to her more pirate-y feel including being a drunkard who speaks like a pirate and having a costume that looks more like a pirate. She also is a cirus performer in the real world, during the tours she stilt walks and hula-hoops...Mind you EA's shows take place in a victorian asylum...
- Australian children's music group The Wiggles have Captain Feathersword, sometimes known as the 'fifth Wiggle'. He's definitely The Pirates Who Dont Do Anything type, though he can tickle you to death.
- Running Wild is one of the first metal bands to pick up the pirate image. Their songs are based on the subject (and takes cues from the Type 2).
- The Arrogant Worms have "The Last Saskatchewan Pirate", who, according to the song, plunders ships on the Saskatchewan river, "stealing wheats and barley and all the other grains".
- Alestorm are a Pirate Metal band. Yes, they are as awesome as they sound.
Opera
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40000 features both Dark Eldar and orkish pirates. Renegade Space Marines also often resort to piracy.
- In Graham McNeill's Ultramarines novel Nightbringer, a Dark Eldar pirate is raiding the vessel carrying the Space Marines.
- 40K's Dark Eldar are based on the Dark Elves from Warhammer Fantasy Battle, who are also largely pirates. They engage in piracy partly for the sake of survival (their homeland of Naggaroth has very little arable land, so they steal resources from other races and take them as slaves) and partly out of sheer malice for everyone else in the world.
- Exalted; The Lintha. A family of terrifying, demon-descended, bloodline-obsessed, super-powerful buccaneers. Who make you eat your shipmates.
- Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirls!
- Crimson Skies is an Alternate History setting where the United States of America broke up early in the 30's. With the interstate road and railroad network gone freight is instead delivered by air cargo services operating massive cargo zeppelins; these are in turn preyed upon by air pirates. Some of these pirates-like Nathan Zachary-are Type 2. Others-like Ulysses Booth-are definitely Type 1.
Video Games
- Monkey Island Though most of the pirates seem to be Type 2. This gets subverted when Guybrush contracts a Pox that makes everyone type 1 for progressively longer periods of time.
- Skies Of Arcadia, an RPG for the Sega Dreamcast, later ported to the Nintendo Gamecube, features Air Pirates sailing the skies of a world with no oceans and floating continents. It also draws a distinct line between idealized pirates and real ones: Real pirates are called, appropriately, Black Pirates. Blue Rogues, on the other hand, are generally adventurers and explorers who only attack The Empire's ships and Black Pirates.
- For pirates of the space variety, see the Metroid series. Besides the whole Take Over The Universe thing, this is played surprisingly close to the modern real life version.
- Final Fantasy, an RPG for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), had the very brief encounter with Bikke the pirate, who fixes the Broken Bridge of being stuck on the initial continent by awarding you a boat after his defeat. Ironically, enough, outside of the hat and the "Argh"-speak, he could easily just be a regular boat-owner.
- Final Fantasy V on the other hand, has pirate captain Faris, a long lost sister of Princess Lenna, who was raised by pirates who found her, and disguised herself as a man. The Playstation version is known for giving her the stereotypical pirate accent.
- This is in fact made even better since the game's job system lets you make her a ninja, thus combining two of the most badass forces in the universe.
- In the Sony RPG Rogue Galaxy the heroes are space pirates.
- A couple of Wario Land platformers pits the greedy anti-hero against Captain Syrup and her pirate minions.
- And the Shake King from Wario Land: The Shake Dimension is a pirate with very much similar minions to Captain Syrup. He's also more like an Evil Overlord and a viking.
- Sid Meier's Pirates!, naturally. NPC pirates are mostly of the first type, but the Player Character can be either.
- The arcade/Dreamcast shooter Gunbird 2 has a Team Rocket-esque group of pirates, called the Queen Pirates, as the Big Bads. With a buxom female pirate as the leader. Plus, they also have an army of humongous mecha. What a winningcombination!
- Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates is almost (but not quite) all Type 2. It's hard to be a mean, evil, unkempt scourge of the seas when you're a cartoon pirate in pretty outfit, with no nose.
- The Legend Of Zelda The Wind Waker
- A bonus character in the upcoming PS 3 version of Tales Of Vesperia will be a Loli-Pirate named Patty.
- The undead pirate captain, Cervantes.
- A fair number of Eve Online players are deadly type-1 Space Pirates.
- In Chapter 4 of Eternal Sonata, the ship you're on is attacked by the pirate ship Dolce. You confront her captain (and namesake), later fight her again, and may fight her yet again before the game is over. Additionally, there are pirates in the Mysterious Unison.
- In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, you take on the animated skull of the infamous pirate Cortez.
- And earlier in the series, there was the shark pirates led by Jonathan Jones in Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. He seems to be Type 1 at first, but after being defeated, he Nakama befriends Mario and company, freely giving them the star piece and then helping them to corner Yaridovich. There's also the occasional pirate enemies in other Mario games such as the Shy Guy Pirates in Yoshis Story.
- "Cap'n" Ginny of My Sims is obessed with pretending to be a pirate, and her best friend (boyfriend?) goes along with it. By My Sims Kingdom, she's moved on to a new profession, but her old obsession is still referenced by Vic Vector when you give him a figurine of her.
- Tropico 2: Pirate Cove shows that it takes a lot of work to be a successful pirate lord, far more than just sailing the high seas to find victims or Buried Treasure.
Web Comics
- A major arc in the popular Sluggy Freelance featured "The Pirates of the Oceans Unmoving"... pirates in flying ships, sailing through cross-dimensional waters where time doesn't exist. In a clever subversion, it turns out that most (though not all) of the "pirates" are actually geeks who ended up "outside time" as a result of various technological mishaps, failed experiments, et cetera, found all these abandoned, flying ships, and decided to live out life-long dreams of adventures on the high (if unmoving) seas.
- Starslip Crisis has absurdly literal Space Pirates. Identical to our pirate stereotypes but...in space. Steel Eyepatches, laser-cutlasses, sails on their ships. Led by Infra-Red Beard, they even have pirate science officers. Who man the Rum Sensors.
- In Order of the Stick, when Elan needs to reach Azure City, he meets a Sky Pirate.
- In 8-bit Theater, Garland recruits pirates to help him against the Light Warriors.[1]
- I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space. Yes, lesbian space pirates.
- Bangladesh DuPree of Girl Genius, Ax Crazy Pirate Queen under the employ of the Baron. This may be where Gil got the idea for his cover story.
- The titular hero of The Adventures Of Dr Mc Ninja spends one of his first major story arcs battling pirates. The origin of the Pirates vs. Ninjas conflict is explored. Frozen shamrock shurikens are thrown. Like everything else in this comic, it has to be read to be believed.
- Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger has his first encounter with pirates. and philosophizes about it here.
Western Animation
- On Codename Kids Next Door, the KND sometimes had to deal with candy-stealing pirate and recurring foe Stickybeard.
- Pirates Of Dark Water offers a fantasy take, complete with fantasy swearing.
- In the LazyTown episode that the page quote comes from, the children are playing pirates, and are shown a history book that tells them about Rottenbeard, a pirate who once victimised LazyTown (despite it being very clearly inland) and stole a corner of a stone containing a message from the town's founder, then was driven off by a hero who is dressed suspiciously like an old-fashioned version of Sportacus (presumably one of the former Sportacuses, given that the current is number 10), with ninja-like swords crossed across his back. The kids are impressed, so Robbie decides to take advantage of the kids' pirate fever by dressing as Rottenbeard and singing the quoted song, then getting them to 'help' him look for the missing corner, which he has made a mock-up of that makes the message say "LazyTown should always be lazy". When a real copy is found of Rottenbeard's map, he resorts to tying them up. Sportacus intervenes, and fights Robbie (who is still in costume, and for all he knows could be dangerous) armed with tennis rackets, rather than the bladed weapons seen in the drawing of his presumed ancestor. Robbie is unmasked, and the stone dug up, which turns out to read "LazyTown should always be happy".
- Fred Perry, author of the comic Gold Digger, actually made a short animation sketch of the first part of said episode's song, featuring his Voltron Pirate Ninja Leprechaun characters. Apparently, he actually bought the rights to do it legally, despite it being a test animation, and yes that's a ninja doing pelvic thrusts with a katana/shovel strapped to his crotch.
- Kim Possible is on a field trip to a Colonial Williamsburg-type historical reenactment town, when Dr. Drakken gets possessed by a pirate ghost and comes gunning for the town in the episode "Captain Drakken". The heroes, complete with Wade who arrives on a white charger, fight him off the old fashioned way, to save their grades.
- By shocking coincidence, this episode aired on The Disney Channel about a week before Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End opened.
- La Resistance in Skyland are proud to call themselves pirates.
- Transformers Animated has Lockdown, a transforming robot pirate.
- Cannonball of Transformers: Cybertron is an actual space pirate, complete with skeleton paint apps and a black swath of paint over half of the top of his face in mimicry of an eyepatch.
- Captain Pugwash.
- Captain Hook and his crew in Disney's Peter Pan.
- The Veggie Tales videos once had a Silly Song with Larry titled The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything. Originally it was just, well, a silly song where Larry and some of the other cast dressed up as pirates and sang about how they just sat around and looked cool all day, but the popularity of the characters and song meant that eventually they became (sort of) real pirates for the two feature films.
- Parodied in a recent episode of South Park, where Cartman and his assembled gang meet the Somalian pirates (see the real life section below) and turned them away from modern piracy and fashioned them into pirates as seen in popular culture.
- Danny Phantom: Youngblood and his crew of dead pirates. Complete with Ghost Ship.
- Avatar The Last Airbender had the kids run in to pirates in season one during which Karata "high-risk trades" a scroll that has waterbending moves on it from them. The pirates team up with Prince Zuko to capture the gAang and when the pirates refuse to hand Aang over to him the resulting brawl allows the kids to escape. Later on in the season final the same pirates are hired by Admiral Zhao to kill Zuko. Also in season three when Sokka andZukosearch for Sokka's father in a Fire Nation prison. They don't find him at first but when they hear other guards talking that new prisoners are arriving and one of them is a pirate they go to check and one of them is Hakoda. No surprise that the Fire Nation would look at a Water Tribe warrior as a pirate!
- There be Pi-Rats (type 2) in two episodes of Chip And Dale Rescue Rangers.
- Featured in two episodes and two songs from Nick Jr.'s The Backyardigans.
Real Life
- Talk Like A Pirate Day
- Everythings Better With Pirates: University of York (York University is in Canada) in England recently held an election for student president. There were two sensible candidates and Mad Cap'n Scott, who carried a duck named Brian on his shoulder, said 'Aharrr' a lot and promised cutlass training for all student officers. Guess who won. Cap'n Scott has legitimate pirate credentials: he runs the UK branch of Talk Like A Pirate Day.
- On "Talk Like A Pirate Day 2008", Facebook created an option to display everything in Pirate Speak.
- And unlike Google, they actually put some effort into it.
- Henry Morgan, later governor of Jamacia. Since he fought only the Spanish and while they were at war with the English (at least to the best of his knowledge) a border-line case. Many fictional pirates (Type 2) have drawn on his history, which explains why so many became colonial governers.
- Likewise Henry Every— The most Bad Ass pirate you've never heard of. Nicknamed the King of Pirates, he was one of the few Great Captains to successfully retire with pretty much all of his loot and suffer almost no repercussions for his crimes. Made a spectacular fool out of the East-India trading company through out his entire career and was more or less the impetus for the creation of hired Pirate Hunters like Captain Kidd.
- Blackbeard — While having far from the largest haul, Blackbeard is particularly notorious for the stories about him, such as that once, while playing cards, he blew out the light and shot at random, seriously wounding one of his crew, and declared afterward if he didn't act like that, they would forget who their master was; or the time he proposed they test themselves against their future state, and filled up below the deck with sulfur pots to see how long they lasted, and when he lasted the longest he was proud of it. Heavily influenced the Type 1 pirate.
- Captain Kidd, though the true extent of his guilt is uncertain.
- Bartholomew Roberts, one of the more successful Caribbean pirates, is probably the closest pirates ever got to Type 2 in reality. He did kill a bunch of people, but often treated captives with compassion (unless his crew really wanted to hurt them).
- It was actually pretty common for pirates to treat their prisoners reasonably well. They mainly replenished their ranks from among them after all, as they all tended to be former sailors from navy or commercial vessels fed up with lousy pay and tyrannical captains. The officers tended to be free game, however.
- And if you treat your captives reasonably well and allow them to leave alive, then the crew of any future ship captured is less likely to fight and be more compliant. This, in turn, heightens the success rate of future endevours, meaning its in your best interest as a pirate to treat your captives well and let them live.
- Real-life pirates just re-entered the news cycle. On April 8, 2009, the Maersk Alabama, a U.S.-flagged cargo ship, was taken by pirates off the coast of Somalia. Captain Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama gave himself up as a hostage to ensure his crew's safety. According to the International Maritime Bureau, a watchdog group based out of Kuala Lumpur, the Maersk Alabama was the sixth vessel taken by Somali pirates in a week, and they have staged 66 attacks since January and are still holding 14 ships and 260 crew members as hostages. (This entry added
April 9, 2009, using a fresh newspaper article April 10, 2009, using the previous day's newspaper as reference.)
- And yes, like the intro to this article suggests, these pirates definitely seem more threatening and less comical than The Theme Park Version we're used to here. That could just be the modern weaponry and technology talking, though—these guys are armed with automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, and anti-tank rocket launchers, and coordinate their attacks with GPS systems and satellite phones. In other words, the only similarities between these Somali pirates and the pirates of fiction is that both of them are plundering ships. The general rule of thumb with modern pirates is that if they're covering their face, they're not planning on killing you.
- As of shortly after noon Eastern time, Sunday April 12, the score stands at one pirate captured, the other three killed by U.S. Navy snipers and Capt. Philips liberated unharmed.
- The fact it took this long demonstrates something. Piracy had been an issue in that area for about a year and never fully went away in South East Asia.
- From the Somali point of view, many of the foreign fishermen that pretty much emptied their country's territorial waters and ruining their livelihoods in the process, could be seen as the pirates. Not to condone their actions, of course, just playing Devils Advocate.
- The US Coast Guard likes to think of themselves as all... piratey. It has to do with the whole "Arr, matey's, let's seize us some ships" deal. The Revenue Cutter Service, which was the original service, included hunting pirates among its duties. So does the modern one.
Web Original
- Open Blue, which features both types, depending on whether they're NPC's or not. Player characters tend to be of the second type. Usually.
|
|
