YMMV / The Sea Hawk

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Philip's speech about how the entire world "will be Spain" makes a seldom seen reference (likely a case of Accidentally-Correct Writing given the medium) to how the Habsburg Spanish Empire wasn't a truly colonial empire, in the sense that all of its lands were administrated as an extension of Spain and not as lands merely subjected to Spain. Most importantly, it might be surprising to know that the mentioned conquest of China was actually proposed during Philip's reign, with the most complete plan being a Spanish-Portuguese invason with the help of Konishi Yukinaga and hopefully local Chinese allies - and that it was exactly the failure of the Spanish Armada what led Philip to cancel the Chinese affair for considering it unnecesary and too risky.
• Awesome Music: Perhaps the most over-the-top and wildly effective scene has Thorpe and his crew, escaped from slavery on a Spanish galley, bursting into song (with the full backing of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's orchestra) as they set forth to England. Real lump in the throat stuff.
• Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: The film portrays Philip II and the Spanish Empire in their usual negative light, but in spite of this, many modern Hispanics have re-discovered the film and found Montagu Love's performance admirable and badass instead. His "With England conquered" speech became a minor meme among Hispanist-oriented people in The New '20s.
• Misaimed Fandom: As mentioned above, mainly due to Montagu Love's great presence and lines, his Evil Gloating has been embraced with some sincerity by Hispanics that miss their culture's ancient splendor.
• Spiritual Successor: To Captain Blood, with Errol Flynn in a sea epic directed by Michael Curtiz. Also arguably to The Adventures of Robin Hood.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Geoffrey Thorpe is a handsome and charming swashbuckler, but when he's in front of The Spanish Inquisition he boasts of pillaging Spanish towns, proudly confessing to doing more of it than he's being charged with. In the 1930s this made him a badass to kids watching the movie, but today one can hardly blame the Spanish judge for throwing the book at him and the Spanish government for demanding that the English pull the plug on their privateers as a result.
  • The whole sequence might have even felt a hair uncomfortable just a decade later, if anybody was watching it in the aftermath of World War II and all that accompanied it. Given what was likely involved with some of the aforementioned pillaging, that hearing would've been perhaps a bit too similar to other hearings which were being held in Germany in the late 1940s. Paradoxically for a wartime film that employed the Spanish Empire to represent Nazi Germany, the metaphor can easily switch to the other side due to the late imagery of the real life conflict.

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