Kids today think of Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, and the rest of the swarthy Disney crew whenever someone mentions pirate movies. Pirates of the Caribbean is a grand man-o-war of a franchise, an easily accessible, enjoyable story for all ages and types. Skeleton pirates, asian pirates, drunk pirates, pirates with
washboard abs, the movies have it all, and they were incredibly successful.
But, this wasn't always the case. Historically pirate movies have bombed. Or more accurately, sunk the studios they were attached to.
And now I present....Choppy Waters: Summer Blockbusters and Pirates!
The first pirate movies were also the first Hollywood Blockbusters. Early films were shown in small rooms and lasted only a few minutes. A reel was about 18 minutes long, and no movies were 2 reels. The stories were simple and mostly cowboy in nature.
Then D.W. Griffith came along and made a 6 reel epic called "Birth of a Nation." It grossed 15 million dollars in a time when a million dollars could buy the presidency. Suddenly features were born.
Shortly thereafter came the exotics. Escapism was the big thing and people wanted to be taken far away from their homes. This brought us the "Sheik" in the wide Arabian desert, and "Captain Blood" on the high seas. Captain Blood was a spectacular pirate movie. Several sequels followed. The stunts in these movies outclass the best of today's stuntwork, and in the 20's every boy wanted to be a pirate, and every girl wanted to love one.
Into the 30's Errol Flynn became Hollywood's golden boy. He was a charming thief and a pirate in the movies, and he was pretty much the same in real life.
Until he disappeared.
Errol Flynn literally vanished, and with him pirate movies (he actually went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, though Hollywood didn't know for years). Before Flynn and his swashbuckling could be replaced, gunslingers and gangsters rose to power on the silver screen, and pirates were lost in the shuffle.
But within a decade even the gunslingers would be out trumped by new blockbusting leading men, the dancers...
Fred Astaire had always been kicking around, but when Gene Kelly tapped his way into major motion pictures, musicals reigned the summer. The late 40's, the 50's, and all the way through the early 60's, the summer musicals got all the buzz. Westerns were still being spurred along by John Wayne, but pirate movies were nowhere to be found.
With one exception. 1956 brought us the Seven Voyages of Sinbad, and suddenly pirates were keen, but only for a summer, then they disappeared into the nethers of B genre flicks.
The 70's abandoned the concept of the summer blockbuster altogether as studios tumbled and independent cinema had its hey day.
Then Star Wars broke the mold, and brought in an era of space sci-fi that lasted most of the 80's. Of course, many of these films were essentially space pirate films, but a space pirate just isn't the same. There were a couple real pirate films in the 80's, Cutthroat Island for instance, but this movie bankrupt many a studio exec, and ruined the careers of most the people involved, it was that bad and that expensive.
The 90's were all about action, war, and epic disaster, and the turn of the century brought us the advent of the super hero movie. Even the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie wasn't expected to be a blockbuster. Nobody expected it to break 100 million dollars.
But here we are today, where a bet on a pirate film is a good bet indeed.
Sorry for the longwindedness of the post, I even forgot to mention the
damage control master formula and
omega 3 vitamins. Oh well, there's always next month.
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