I don’t think anyone can argue that a few years ago, there was what can only be described as a “Pirate Boom” - in the space of mere months, Pirate stuff was suddenly everywhere.
I suddenly heard about “National Talk like a Pirate Day” on everyone’s blogs, it seemed like everyone was suddenly mentioning pirates - this person would have an eye-patch on in their profile picture, or that guy would jokingly be saying “Arrr!” all the time. Then it really blew up - within the space of about a month, “Pirates of the Caribbean” came out to smashing box office success, Sid Meier’s “Pirates” video game was released to critical acclaim (like westerns, Pirate video games are all-but-nonexistent, so this was a very noticeable thing), Trader Joe’s “Pirate Booty” snack was suddenly omnipresent, and Pirate-themed Legos made a big comeback. Inexplicable non-sequiter zines started showing up at my local bookstore like “The life of Cindy McPantynickers, a girl pirate!” News outlets announced that pirate was the most popular costume for that year’s Halloween. “Spongebob Squarepants,” a show that constantly features pirates and pirate/high seas iconography, became an enormous sensation among both children and adults. An indie rock band called the Decemberists, trading in what can only be described as “ironic sea shanties” or “pirate rock,” suddenly became the toast of the college rock scene.
Here’s my question: why? What caused that? Half of the people I mention this to refuse to acknowledge that this was a veritable, quantifiable phenomenon (in spite of the numerous listed examples, all occuring within a six month period), and the other half offer flaccid “uh, people just like pirates and stuff” explanation.
Wrong. There was SOMETHING going on here, and I just can’t figure it out. Who has insights? Who knows what caused this? What confluence of events or trends? With almost any other pan-medium movement or trend, you can at least figure out why, what inspired and led to it. On this, I’m just completely clueless. Help!
It was the movie. Pirates of the Caribbean was a huge hit - over $300 million US BO - and more important, it was a hit with a distinctive, easily-referenced theme, much like the Matrix four years earlier. Everything else derived from that. The only exception was the Sid Meyer game, which came out a year later, was probably in development a year earlier, and was a sequel to a game from the early 90’s.
No insights, just my WAG. The Internet is to blame. Now, now, I love the internet, possibly too much, but there is a dark side to everything. People have been known to copy or “pirate” software/music/movies/cookie recipes/etc and some folks in the business of selling said software/music/movies/cookie recipes/etc don’t much appericate the plundering of their respective assets. (teehee) Anyway, kids these days like things that make the old farts wonder if society is doomed, and to some, the rampant dissalution of society firmly stems from peoples refusal to maintain the buying habits of the past. Kids today are getting their software/music/movies/cookie recipes/etc from electronic sources that don’t fall within the business model of the “way it’s done!” Oh the humanity. The people who do this are just like the pirates of old and are to be feared, hunted down, and forced to advertise Rum, seafood fastfood chains, and sports teams.
I’m not sure I buy this - I see the movie as the sort of apex of the trend rather than the originator; the majority of the listed things were already good and going before the film, and I was already curious about the trend before the movie dropped.
Ah, but the trailers for POTK were out months, if not more that a year, before the movie opened. I saw trailers last week for movies that won’t be out until November 2006.
So I think people saw the cool trailers for POTK and got in a pirate mood for a couple of years.
Hmm, but the Talk Like A Pirate Day column appeared in September 2002, more than 9 months before POTC premiered, and if the originators are to be believed, they’d been celebrating it for 7 years before that. Given Dave Barry’s popularity on t’internet, and the fact that (and let’s be honest) it’s mostly geeks who’ve been going around saying “arrrr”, I’d lay it at feet of the TLAP guys way before crediting Hollywood with some originality.
Oh and I’d like to take this opportunity to plug a profoundly stupid but quite ridiculously funny book wot I read.
Yeah but the teaser trailers sucked. IIRC they were nothing more than shots of islands that looked like skulls and the like, certainly nothing to prepare the public for what Johnny Depp was going to pull off.
So I think I agree that while it was definately fuel for the fire, POTC wasn’t the originator of pirate mania.
Arrr, ye scurvy bunch of bilge rats. Doesn’t ye know that everybody secretly wants to be a pirate?
(I mean, even if it weren’t for those fabulous boats and the invigorating salt air, just think of the outfits! Who doesn’t look simply gorgeous in a long velvet frock coat with gold piping and all those cute little buttons??)
Now quit this idle chatterin’ and get back to your posts, or I’ll split yer gizzards for shark chum, the lotta ye!! Arrr!
Sid Meier’s Pirates! came out in 1987, for what it’s worth, which was remade (by Sid Meier) as Pirates! Gold in 1993 for Windows.
In other piratey gaming news, Bethsoft released Sea Dogs in 2000, which had enough commercial success to warrant a sequel, the tentatively-titled Sea Dogs 2 which was renamed Pirates of the Caribbean once they cashed in on the movie license they acquired. That, at least, seems fortuitously coincidental – they had a nearly-complete pirate game ready, a pirate hit movie comes out, and they adapt one to the other with relative ease.
If there’s one thing that the internet agrees on, it is the inherent coolness of
[ul]
[li]Robots[/li][li]Ninjas[/li][li]Cowboys[/li][li]Pirates[/li][/ul]
It was inevitable that at least one of them would become a mainstream cultural phenomenon.
I’d just like to point out that I was a fan of pirates before that film. Have been since I was a kid, and one of my ‘characters’ is a pirate. I’ve been known to play with my food, and allegedly I’ve made pirate ships from French fries and toothpicks at DopeFests.
In my fraternity we were doing to whole pirates thing since the spring of 1992 when we tried to come up with the lamest idea for a party we could, and it became a tradition, and then a movement.
–Cliffy
P.S. This, originally published in June 2000, shows that the whole pirate thing’s been around a long time.
Let us not overlook the rollicking comic novel The Pyrates by George Macdonald Fraser, originally published in the 1980s but reissued during the recent wave of pyrate chic, belike. Wi’ a curse.
Is it possible that the popularity of Spongebob Squarepants is responsible (at least in part)? Pirate characters, and the way Mister Krabs talks, are definitely prominent in that cartoon.
Let us also not overlook the influence of the Walt Disney ride, Pirates of the Caribbean. Go Wikipedia!
You grow up, you marry, you have children, you take them to Disneyworld, and you take them on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. You buy a pirate flag.
What’s not to like about ‘Hi, Ho, Hey, Hey, a Pirate’s life for me’?
At least one of the scenes in the Pirates movie was taken directly from the ride - that of Jack trying to get the dog with with keys to come over to his cell.
This ride also had an influence on the ‘ambience’ of the revered Monkey Island computer game series.
