A Pirate 400 Years Too Late

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Salty dogs of the highway
"Whenever pirates turn up in a romance set more recently than 1843, you figure the filmmakers ran out of ideas."
—Roger Ebert 's review of Six Days, Seven Nights

Swashbuckling, rum-swilling, peg-legged pirates in modern times.

Compare and contrast Sky Pirates. Space Pirates is when they are a few more centuries late. For modern, Real Life pirates of the type who are very good at shivering people's timbers (with an AK-47 not a cutlass), see Ruthless Modern Pirates. If the pirates are more concerned with looking the part than acting it, they're probably The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything.

Examples of A Pirate 400 Years Too Late include:

Comic Books

  • Batman villains Captain Stingaree and Cap'n Fear.
    • Somewhat subverted in the case of Cap'n Fear and his crew, as Detective Harvey Bullock doesn't find them funny or charming at all ("I hate them swishbucklers.") and one of Fear's own men mutters about how he's getting "sick of this Popeye rap" (though he promptly changes his mind once the Dark Chick threatens to slit his throat).
    • In one Golden Age story, Batman fights a one-shot villain called Blackbeard, who styles himself after the historical Blackbeard.
  • Scar and his crew from The Strangers comic book in The Ultraverse. After gaining superpowers, they moved to the Caribbean and become pirates, basing their costumed identities on classic pirates.
  • Commander Kraken, foe of the Sub-Mariner in the Marvel Universe.
  • Captain Storm of The Losers (the original World War Two version) became one of these after losing his memory (and an eye) to an explosion.
  • The Subway Pirates from Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers.

Film

Literature

Live Action TV

  • In WWE Paul Burchill briefly became a "wrestling pirate" after discovering that he was a descendant of Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard.
  • The Adventures of Brisco County Jr actually had an inversion - one member of John Bly's gang and his lackeys were a group of actual pirates who were bikers around 80–100 years early. Somehow or another they'd gotten driven off the high seas, so they took to pirating on the American plains, and they just so happen to have stolen some experimental new bicycles Professor Wickwire just knocked up...It's also a literal example of this trope, as they're very much classical pirates (maybe 17th century-ish), but the show is supposed to take place right around the turn of the 20th century.
  • One Pigs in Space sketch in The Muppet Show had John Cleese attacking the Swinetrek as a pirate- of the swashbuckler variety. Link Hogthrob informs him that he's a few centuries out of place, which leads to an argument between John and his parrot.
  • An episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea featured "1970s" pirates who, though using modern technology, would for instance acknowledge an order with "Yo ho!" rather than "Aye aye!" They also dressed the archaic part. Supposedly they felt inspired to do this because their captain was the direct descendant of a famous pirate from two or three centuries before.

Music

Tabletop Games

  • Captain Kraken of Mutants and Masterminds Freedom City setting is a form of this. Essentially, he's an alien Space Pirate who started watching broadcasts of Earth pirate movies and decided that it would be fun to dress himself and his crew in the same style. How serious he is about following the tropes depends on the GM.
  • The Back East: The North sourcebook for Deadlands has the Vikings of Duluth; a group of Scandanavian descendents who adopt Viking trappings to fight the British Navy on the Great Lakes. There are also pirates (drawn in full seventeenth-century garb) in the Great Maze in what used to be California.

Theater

Video Games

  • The Monkey Island games occasionally cross into this due to the Purely Aesthetic Era.
  • The third Sly Cooper game features a trip to Blood Bath Bay, a series of small islands inhabited by "throwbacks" wo still live by old fashioned pirate culture.
  • Bonne Jenet and her crew from The King of Fighters (and before that Mark of the Wolves) are somewhere between this and Ruthless Modern Pirates. The crew dresses like stereotypical pirates, but their ship is a nuclear sub.
  • Uncharted, specifically the third one, has a group of these. They reside in a ship graveyard in the Indian Ocean, and, being the Wacky Wayside Tribe they are, the whole scene there could of easily been cut with no effect on story. It doesn't stop the graveyard from being one hell of a great setpiece, though.
  • The entire Piranha clan from Urban Rivals.

Web Comics

Crewman #1: Ye couldn't best Cap'n Crunch!
Crewman #2: Software Pirates be scarier than ye!

Web Original

  • The entire main cast of Lego Pirate Misadventures, made more prevalent in #3, when they attend an office party in a cube farm and go into a crappy dive bar.
  • The Weebl toon Somalia portrays Somalian pirates like this.

Western Animation

  • The pirates in The Venture Bros episode "Ghosts Of The Sargasso".
  • Mystery Inc confronts these, posing as ghosts no less, in Scooby Doo! Pirates Ahoy!
    • I think Mystery Inc does the same thing in various episodes of the original Scooby Doo series... and those pirates are also posing as ghosts.
  • One episode of the Dennis the Menace UK (from The Beano) cartoon has a group of actors turn out to be real pirates.
  • Cartoon Network's Mike Lu and Og has a trio of pirates who are the shipwrecked descendants of the pirates who shipwrecked the island's other inhabitants.
  • Played for Laughs in a Family Guy episode when Peter goes from stealing a parrot as a pet from a veterinarian's office, to dressing as a stereotypical pirate, then hiring a pirate crew and finally going on the road and engaging a motorist in an epic swashbuckling fight, in the course of which Peter's car acquires a mast and sails.
  • An episode of Teamo Supremo had the kids' teacher tell them that there are no such things as pirates in the modern day. Guess who the villain of the week was?
  • Codename: Kids Next Door features the candy-swiping Captain Stickybeard and crew. Fortunately for them he also hates vegetables.
  • Red Dog the Pirate from Roger Ramjet.
  • Captain Walker D. Plank is a villain in the animated TV series James Bond Jr... He fits the traditional stereotype to the extent that even his Pirate Parrot has an eyepatch and a wooden leg.
  • Youngblood and his pirate crew in Danny Phantom hits the mark of the traditional, swashbuckling pirates we know and love, though this may be a justified case as Youngblood constantly dresses up in costumes for his own childish amusement.
  • The Thundercats had a robot version as a very minor recurring villain, complete with robo-parrot and speech pattern.
  • In the South Park episode "Fat Beard", after hearing about the recent increase in piracy in Somalia, Cartman decides to go and live there (along with Butters, Kyle's little brother Ike, and one of the ginger kids). Kyle and Stan realize what an incredibly stupid idea this, but instead play up his fantasy, encouraging him to go, hoping that he will be killed along the way. Cartman is disgusted to learn that modern Somali pirates are "a disgrace to Blackbeard", and tries to get them to act more traditional.
  • The first episode of The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest had pirates dressed like what you would expect from the typical traditional pirate from a few centuries ago. Justified because they were posing as ghosts to keep people away from a shipwreck while they carry off the loot.
  • The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries episode "You're Thor?" had Vikings a thousand years too late.
  • The Pi-Rats from Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers.
  • Gatlocke from Generator Rex. And he lives in the middle of a desert!
  • A Garfield and Friends episode featured a tv repairman who decided to follow the footsteps of his pirate ancestor and become a full pirate (In fact, the episode describes the tv repairman job as a way for pirate descendants to keep close to their roots). This modern day's pirate's criminal career was helped by the fact the authorities refused to believe whenever his victims reported him. Fortunately Garfield saved the day.
  • One Jackie Chan Adventures episode featured pirates.
  • The unnamed pirate crew on Jimmy Two-Shoes.
  • Played with in the Kim Possible episode where Dr. Drakken gets possessed by a pirate ghost:

Drakken: Aye. Set the mainsail, wench.
Shego: Okay, first of all we don't have any sails. Second of all, call me 'wench' again and we'll be planning a burial at sea.
Drakken: (nervously) Yearr. Arrgh.

Real Life

Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/A_Pirate_400_Years_Too_Late?oldid=1927801"