The Pirate Movie

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The Pirate Movie
The Pirate Movie film poster
Directed by	Ken Annakin
Produced by	Ted Hamilton (executive) David Joseph
Written by	W. S. Gilbert (operetta) Trevor Farrant
Starring	Christopher Atkins Kristy McNichol Ted Hamilton
Music by	Mike Brady Terry Britten (songs) Sue Shifrin (songs) Peter Sullivan
Cinematography	Robin Copping
Editing by	Ken Zemke
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	August 6, 1982
Running time	105 min./USA: 98 min.
Country	Australia
Language	English
Budget	$5,000,000
IMDb profile

The Pirate Movie is a 1982 musical and comedy film directed by Ken Annakin and starring Christopher Atkins and Kristy McNichol. The film is loosely based on Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Pirates of Penzance. The original music score is composed by Mike Brady and Peter Sullivan.

Taglines:

Set Sail for the Musical Comedy Adventure of the Summer!
Yar! Buckle your swash and Jolly your Roger for the funniest rock 'n' rollickin' adventure ever!

1 Plot summary
2 Main cast
3 Historical note
4 Ebay trivia
5 Awards and nominations
6 Locations
7 External links

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Mabel Stanley, an introverted girl who yearns for popularity attends a pirate festival in her seaside community in Australia along with about a dozen bikini-clad bombshells. The festival features a swordplay demonstration led by a curly haired hunk. After selecting the clumsy Mabel ("nominated" by one of the aforementioned bombshells) to participate in the act, the instructor invites her aboard his boat for a real ride on the high seas — at which point her catty acquaintances latch on for the trip. Sent to get hamburgers for the outing, Mabel's bikini-clad "friends" sabotage the outing by grabbing the guy, the boat and the burgers and sail off without her.

Intent on catching up and joining her "friends" and dream guy, Mabel rents a small sail boat (not intended for open ocean use) armed with only her trusty portable stereo and is thrown overboard in a sudden storm, washing up on a beach.

Thus begins a fantasy in which the unconscious Mabel imagines herself in a real pirate adventure, complete with a dashing (and very familiar-looking curly haired) pirate, a pirate king with a bejeweled codpiece, a legion of his crusty shipmates, and dozens of unwed sisters who must rise to the altar before she can. In the film's ending, Mabel wakes up and gets rescued by the instructor, who assures her that he is not who she imagines him to be.

[edit] Main cast

Actor	Role
Christopher Atkins	Frederic
Kristy McNichol	Mabel Stanley
Ted Hamilton	The Pirate King
Bill Kerr	Major-General
Maggie Kirkpatrick	Ruth
Garry McDonald	Sergeant/Inspector

[edit] Historical note

The movie was made soon after the 1980 New York City Central Park and 1981 Broadway theatre production of The Pirates of Penzance produced by Joseph Papp re-popularized swashbuckling pirates.

[edit] Ebay trivia

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Because Columbia House seemed to have exclusive rights to distribute The Pirate Movie on VHS, New and even used copies would sell for around $30 to $40 on Ebay in the days before the Anchor Bay DVD was announced. Even though the movie could be purchased for around $10 from Columbia House, there was a steady niche market of people willing to pay a premium for the hard-to-find title.

The soundtrack for The Pirate Movie was one of the most bootlegged titles on Ebay in the mid to late 90s. CD-R's were blatantly listed in auctions, and soon removed by Ebay staffers. Some made it through; some sellers sold copies of the vinyl with free CD-R "backups" as bonus gifts. Some of these auctions were close to $100. The soundtrack has still never been re-issued on CD and Vinyl and Cassette copies continue to circulate the net.

Several versions of varying quality have surfaced on P2P networks. The most common one is distinguishable by the a buzzing or humming sound (most likely caused by the presence of a poorly grounded cable-TV connection in a home-theater system that the turntable was a part of). One of the other common versions uses dubs from the film (obvious because of the sound effects and dialogue heard in certain songs) and combined those with songs that were dubbed poorly from a crackly vinyl copy.

Vinyl copies of the soundtrack still sell for $10-$20 on Ebay, and bootleg CDs continue to appear, some advertised as "limited edition".