In the attraction, they are essentially razing and pillaging a port town. While loss of life is probably certain with cannonballs and fire around, none is shown, so there isn’t any to “make light of”
Lots of drunken pirates about to cause accidental murder by playing near explosives or using each other for target practice, though.
I don’t think the idea is “Pirates should act like good role models” but rather “women being sold into sexual slavery is not an appropriate subject to play for laughs in a family-oriented theme park attraction.”
Which I completely agree with, but I can’t help being led a little further down the road to thinking about how weird it is to have a ride glorifying murder and theft. Not that I’m really bothered - it just makes me think what an odd world we live in
This is true, but actually makes it even weirder. I mean, when you think about the kiddie version of pirates, what do you get? I mean, buried gold, and people going “yar”, eyepatches and swashbuckling and… walking the plank. At least whenever I read or saw anything with pirates as a kid, walking the plank would at least be mentioned. I’d argue it’s one of the more iconic elements of film pirates. Which means the attempt to make pirates fun would then be playing up a cruel and horrifying form of execution as well.
The Haunted Mansion ride has lots of murder too, but I think everyone can agree that it would be a lot less funny if it were strongly implied that any of the ghosts had been raped to death.
I wonder if it has anything to do with the relative plausibility of the assumption that both the audience and the entertainer agree that murder for real would definitely be beyond the pale vs. sex slaves(please, ‘concubines’) for real would be beyond the pale?
There are certainly other factors; but things generally cause less alarm if they are sufficiently transgressive as to make it pretty clear that nobody involved takes them seriously except as entertainment; and more alarm if some of the people involved seem a little too close to not actually seeing the problem here.
I’d be curious to know if ‘walking the plank’ is bowdlerized keel-hauling.
That one is substantially messier; and harder to cut away from while it’s still just a seagoing diving board.
And in those cases it’s less clear who is the innocent victim.
Two guys having a sword fight is a swashbuckling showdown. Two drunks shooting off guns near each other while surrounded by explosives is a form of slapstick. Armed men selling helpless (and mostly weeping) women into sexual slavery has neither of those qualities.
Well, you also have the mayor being waterboarded in the well, too. Pretty much all the ride is built of scenarios of various levels of indefensibility. Theft, arson, vandalism, terrorism, slavery, kidnapping, torture, drunken cuddling with innocent pigs, jailbreaking… none of which is redeemed by any heroic action at any point in the ride.
Oh, there’s slut-shaming too. “Strike yer colors, ye brazen wench! No need to be exposin’ yer superstructure.”
Eventually Disney might get around to addressing the colonialism/imperialism of the Jungle Cruise, or maybe the reckless endangerment throughout Mr Toad’s Wild Ride (hey, at least that ride shows consequences: break the law, go directly to Hell). I think the shooting galleries might finally be gone, but Disneyland still contains a shitload of problematic content.
I suspect I should let it bother me more.
Hey now, the pigs are clearly happy in that scene. Uncaged and oinking in delight. For all you know they were just freed from certain death.
As for the jailbreakers, that’s pretty defensible too since the jail is ON FIRE.
Here is a picture:
A rotund woman on the auction block looks around anxiously with her hands clasped next to auctioneer. To the left is a line of crying women tied together by a rope, an older woman tries to comfort a teenaged-looking girl. The “Redhead” is in the middle, apparently enjoying her own sale, lifting her skirt and primping her hair. They are attended by a guard, but he can’t be seen in this photo.
To be fair, she’s got a big grin on her face and giggles as she turns. It’s played for a laugh, as in, she’s so chubby that she’s tickled by the attention to “show her larboard side”.
But the ones tied up on the left are definitely weeping. It’s not a comfortable scene.
My first thought was “You can’t just tidy up everything until they aren’t doing anything bad!”
My second thought was, as someone above basically said, this isn’t a museum, it’s a fun ride at a family attraction. Go ahead and change.
And then sort of doubled down on that second thought after seeing just how much it’s played for laughs in the photos. (I’ve never actually seen it, but that didn’t stop me from having opinions! =o)
COMING SOON: The Grand Theft Auto ride at Disneyland.
But wasn’t that the whole ISIS thing? They were capturing productive oil fields and banking the profits.
Hm. Interesting point. From my point of view I can imagine killing someone. I can’t imagine selling someone.
(Imagining killing someone who’s selling someone requires distressingly little effort.)
That’s a… grim scene for a theme park attraction. If everyone was doing the redhead thing I can see how it might work if you cauterized a portion of your morality and/or soul, but with the weeping… Jesus. That’s disturbing.
“larboard”
Huh. That’s a damned odd place to go for historical accuracy, but it is only ‘port’ from the 19th century…
Contributing to the delinquency of swine is probably an actionable offense in some jurisdictions. I am confident that few of those li’l piggies were of drinking age, let alone the age of consent.
I feel so dirty just looking at it.
Piffle. I’ve been through that ride dozens of times over the past 40 years, and the prison is still standing. I’m beginning to doubt the prisoners were ever in any real danger at all.
No joke: About 15 or 20 years ago the company was seriously considering building a ride based on the “Dick Tracy” franchise, complete with you getting to operate a tommy gun out the window of a speeding car. They went so far as to build a functional prototype vehicle on a test track, which I’m told was really fun. But someone at the company came to their senses and canned the idea before it went further.
ETA: This was in the early 90’s, and it turns out they even did a press release and put out concept art. Turns out the reason they axed it wasn’t because someone thought that teaching children to do drivebys with automatic weapons was a bad idea, but because the movie didn’t do as well in theaters as hoped. So who knows, we may get a GTA ride someday after all!
I remember seeing this press release! I was a newly hatched Disney fanatic back then and scoured the news for any park rumors, and I was super excited by this ride and wondered whatever happened to it.
My favorite lost ride was “Nostromo”, which would’ve been a combination ride and walk-thru where you actually make your way through the Nostromo armed with laser guns as space Marines, evading the xenomorph, creeping its way around the ship. They did full scale mockups and effects tests, apparently, before someone said “holy crap guys, this is going in the Magic Kingdom! You can’t have Aliens in Tomorrowland!”. They scaled it back to be the ExtraTerrorestrial Alien Encounter, which was still super scary, but a Nostromo attraction (in Disney-MGM) would’ve been awesome.
The movies have changed the Ride a lot, I see. When I was a wee lad back in the late seventies, we visited Disneyland in Anaheim and the ride was like the Hauted Mansion and was supposed to be more scary. The pirates were supposed to be unsympathetic, something to be feared rather than cheered. Scary-funny, so to speak. But with Captain Jack and other changes, it seems the ride has changed so much I doubt I would recognize it.
