IN case you didn't know, the one thing pirates of the Caribbean lusted after when they reached one of those raucous port hideouts was food. Disney's 'bad' pirates
walk the plankWhat? You thought they drank liquor to excess and chased buxom working wenches around taverns while singing, "Ho, ho, ho and a bottle of rum?" Get with it.
The image of pirates chasing women around taverns, even those enterprising lasses known to shiver your timbers for a farthing or two, is politically incorrect. So Disneyland is overhauling its decades-old "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride to show pirates chasing women carrying plates of food.
This is silly on so many levels that it's hardly worth talking about. To begin with, Disney's original characterization of pirates as mainly lovable rogues was pure fantasy. But since Disney is in the fantasy business, historians didn't go ballistic when Uncle Walt chose to make his pirates the rum-swilling, parrot-on-the-shoulder, plank-walking, peg-legged, quick-to-break-out-in-song variety.
After all, children could not be expected to go on an amusement ride featuring pirates hacking people to pieces with axes, raping young captives of all genders and generally wallowing in the filth and squalor that the festering pirate safe havens actually were.
So Disney cleaned it up and turned the worst parts of pirate life into largely humorous characterizations. The adult public knew that what they were seeing was entertainment, not history.
YET, the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride remained a scary one for kids. The dark, claustrophobic boat ride through the pirate exhibit - with cannon ball splashes to the left and the sudden appearance of menacing pirate automatons to the right - frightened the bejesus out of generations of kids. I know. It scared me when I was a kid. And my daughter spent the entire ride a few years ago hunkered down in the boat afraid to even look out.
By then, I was pretty smug. I wasn't scared a bit. Of course, I was 39 years old. I thought the ride was tame and the robotics a bit outdated. The fact that it featured a scene of a pirate robot chasing a woman robot didn't seem too shocking.
After that ride, I bought a couple of pirate cap pistols - cool, double-barreled things actually made out of metal and real wood - and remember being amazed that Disney was still actually selling toy guns, considering how politically incorrect toy guns had become.
Obviously things have changed. I doubt Disneyland sells toy guns of any sort now, even replicas of historical weapons used by people of the periods depicted in the exhibits.
It isn't surprising that someone was offended to see a pirate robot chasing a prostitute robot and demanded Disney change it. Personally, I doubt the historical accuracy of that tableau anyway. There was plenty of companionship for sale in any port, from Honolulu to Havana, and chasing wasn't necessary. Doubloons were.
The problem is that when you start becoming offended by the way things were in the past to the point of changing them, even in harmless amusement park rides, where does it stop?
Yes, men shouldn't chase women. But, frankly, men
shouldn't chase women carrying plates of food, either.
Men also shouldn't have shot at each other with cannon balls. Does that mean that future Disney exhibits will feature pirates launching blocks of Nerf material at each other with catapults?
And is it politically correct to exploit the handicapped of the past by featuring pirates missing limbs? And are the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals going to eventually demand that parrots on pirates' shoulders be replaced with chunks of tofu?
If that happens, look out, Mickey. The PC Police will be on your tail.
