Captain Blood began life as a series of novels by Rafael Sabatini, chronicling the adventures of Dr. Peter Blood, a physician who turns pirate after being wrongly imprisoned. Since its publication in 1922, Captain Blood has been adapted five times for the silver screen, most notably in the 1935 film, which starred Errol Flynn in the title role.

Perhaps looking to capitalize on the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Warner Bros. producer Bill Gerber dug up the studio's Captain Blood license and started taking pitches from directors. But Gerber didn't anticipate the idea Michael and Peter Spierig had for a Captain Blood reboot: pirates in space.

"At first, I felt like I was in that scene in 'The Player,' where Buck Henry pitches the sequel to 'The Graduate,'" said Gerber. "But when I took a look at their animatic depiction of a pirate battle in space, it had such a distinctive visual look to it that I said, 'Great, I get it.'"

But, despite the promise of space cannons and starships bearing the Jolly Roger, the plot will hold fairly true to the 1935 movie:

The doctor, Peter Blood, joins up with a French pirate (played in the original by Basil Rathbone), only to clash with the buccaneer when the woman he loves (Olivia de Havilland) is captured by the pirate skipper.

Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing a pirate movie not starring Johnny Depp, and I have high hopes for extraplanetary pirates. At best, it could do for Caribbean pirates what shows like Cowboy Bebop and Firefly have done for westerns, and at the very least, it will still be fun to watch swashbuckling in space.

[Variety]

Classic: Faux pirate talk survives into the 31st Century with Futurama's pirates (in space!), who even manage to be wistful between their yarrs:

Disney-fied: Disney's Treasure Island adaptation Treasure Planet may be set in space, but its pirates sound much like the characters in any other Disney movie with the occasional British accent thrown in:

Robotic: Seacons are the nautically-themed pirates of the Transformers Universe. Although most of the Japanese Seacons are incapable of speech, their leader Turtler can call on Seacon drones to transform into King Poseidon:

Dumbed-Down: Brak was once a fearsome space pirate, out to conquer the universe. But an encounter with Space Ghost left his mental faculties severely impaired, reducing him to uttering inanities on Space Ghost's talk show:

Sermonizing: Another former space pirate, Humma Kavula (of the Hollywood version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) left his pirating ways and ran for president. After losing to more popular but less competent Zaphod Beeblebrox, he became a preacher for the Coming of the Great White Hankerchief:

Honor-Bound: In Exosquad's war between humans and Neosapiens, the Pirate Clans, descendants of exiled criminals, have no love for either side. But some pirates still use the language of honor:

Unintelligible: Star Trek's Breen spent years conducting raids against other races, making them ideal partners for Dominion's attack on San Francisco. But little is known about the Breen, as they perpetually encase themselves in suits. It's hard to say whether the electronic garbling they emit is entirely their natural language, or a byproduct of their masks:

Chinese: The crew of Firefly's Serenity steal, smuggle, and occasionally swear in Mandarin:

Wookiee: Smuggler Chewbacca is generally the strong, silent type, but will let out a good roar when the occasion demands:

Sexy Space Pirates!

Mad Science Is Sexy Science!

Aliens Want Your Sex!

The Sex Mechas!

EVE Online has long been known for having one of the most complex economic systems of any MMORPG, and for being visually stunning. It is a pleasure to simply fly around the many star systems and take in the scenery, though you will eventually get your ass handed to you by pirates. With Empyrean Age, freebooters have become the least of your problems. Even high-security systems have fallen into the conflict, and everyone is choosing sides. Players have the opportunity to advance in ranks through their chosen militia by accepting missions from their warfare agent. Taking over a system control bunker will give your faction control of the system, but it will take a highly coordinated assault to get the job done. The expansion also opens a new region of space, The Black Rise. Fighting for control of these 49 new systems will affect the future shape of EVE Online. The war drums are beating (even though no one can hear them, on account of the vacuum). Image by: CCP.

War Is Coming: Empyrean Age. [CCP Games]

You can't make a treaty with pirates, nor can you go to war against them. It's all just booty to them. And pirates rule science fiction — just look at this list of 288 science fiction books with pirate themes, including the awesomely titled Pirates Of Cyber Island, from 1977. Come on, how could a book called Pirates Of Cyber Island not rule? Anywhere, here's a very partial list of space pirates:

Space Pirate Captain Harlock is an anime series by Leiji Matsumoto starring Harlock, a character who's appeared in Matsumoto's anime since 1953. He totally lives up to the pirate image, with the eyepatch and the scar and the giant black cape. But he's really more of a freedom fighter, carrying out raids on the ships of all-female aliens who are oppressing Earth, the Mazone. He's sort of a Sir Francis Drake with way better hair, in space.

Jim Henson's puppets-and-Ben Browder show Farscape included a gang of pirates that trap unwary space travelers inside a region of space called the Flax. Browder and Claudia Black get trapped in the Flax, and the rest of the Moya's crew has to find a way to keep the pirates from claiming their booty.

Comics have included a number of space pirates, including the Starjammers in Marvel's X-Men comics and Starslayer from Mike Grell's series of the same name. The Starjammers are led by Cyclops' dad Christopher Summers, who took the name Corsair and led a group of freaks and aliens on a career of piracy across the galaxy. And they fought the Shi'ar Emperor D'Ken, who wanted to sacrifice his sister Lilandra and gain ultimate power. Meanwhile, Starslayer was an ancient Celtic warrior, who gets zapped forward in time to join the crew of a spaceship called the Jolly Roger, and fight against an evil alien empire.

Star Trek featured a number of pirate races, including the Nausicaans, one of whom stabbed Captain Picard when he was just a brash cadet. But the awesomest pirates in Trek are the Orions, who are big bald scary green/blue guys and super seductive green women. (In an Enterprise episode, it's revealed that the green "slavegirls" are actually in charge, and the men are really their slaves, thanks to feminine wiles 'n' stuff. Irony FTW.) In one episode of the animated series, the Orion pirates raid a Starfleet ship and steal some precious dilithium crystals plus some medicine the Enterprise needs to cure Spock. These pirates are tricky bastards, setting up a meeting with Kirk which turns out to be a trap, courtesy of a dilithium bomb. There's also a whole Orion Pirates space battle game:

The Tranquility Wars by Gentry Lee features a gang of pirates who call themselves the Utopians, who are fighting for their freedom against a totalitarian regime (are we noticing a theme here yet?). They even have the required cybernetic parrots, and go around raiding other spaceships and keeping people for ransom. And the leader of the pirates is named Lance! Lance the space pirate!

Mike Resnick's novel Starship: Pirate includes an evil space pirate named Hammerhead Shark, which is actually a better name for a space pirate than Lance. Actually, the good guy, Wilson Cole, is a space pirate too — but he's a nice pirate, who just steals people's stuff and then sells it back to them. Who turns out to be the better pirate, the friendly Wilson or the toothy Hammerhead?

Space Pirate is the name of an online strategy game, in which the space pirates are traders who don't pay taxes to the Intergalactic Revenue Service. Really. It's all about tax-dodging. Oh, and you get to raid other ships as well.

Time-traveling TV serial Doctor Who actually featured a story called "The Space Pirates," which sadly is neither swash nor buckling. It's the distant future, and there are pirates, but they're a bit pants. They're pants pirates. But even that makes them sound more awesome than they really were. They go around looting ore freighters in deep space, and mostly uncrewed robot freighters.

Doctor Who's failure to bring the Yo-ho-ho was a terrible stain that followed the program for almost a decade — until it finally redressed the balance with another story, "The Pirate Planet." This story has EVERYTHING — including a pirate captain with a cyber eye patch and hook-hand, plus a robot parrot. The "PIrate Planet" zooms around, appearing around other planets and crushing the life out of them. The planet Xanak then strips the precious metals and jewels out of the dead planets, and then... Actually I'm not sure what happens after that. Do they sell the minerals and jewels? To whom? It's never really explained.

The Metroid video game series features the Space Pirates, sometimes called Zebesian Space Pirates, among the main adversaries. They're not just pirates, they're aliens, who sort of look like dragons sometimes. They have three fingered hands or sometimes lobstery claws. They go around the galaxy stealing scientific innovations at the behest of ruthless leaders like Mother Brain, whose name is pretty self explanatory — she's got a brain, and it's a mother:

Our tour of the interwebs in search of Страху нет yielded the band Mumiy Troll, who have been playing music in Russia since 1981. We couldn't find hide nor hair of this song on the site, though. You can hear their entire new album played on their website if you're patient enough to endure their brain-melting powers of rock. Maybe this will spawn a whole slew of scifi music videos that tell an epic story. We can only hope! After all, we're tired of listening to Styx's Kilroy Was Here over and over again.

There are two main hentai space pirate videos that I came across. The first is the totally awesome Uchuu Kaizoku Sala, or Space PIrate Sara. It's pretty much what it sounds like: Sara is an ass-kicking Space Pirate whose top gets shredded a lot. But she also faces down other pirates, as in this sequence where she uses a special space-based ray beam that shreds her rival's armor and a good deal of her clothing:

And here's a clip from Spaceship Agga Ruter, another anime series which features an evil space pirate named Jannis. She captures a duo named Taiyo and Kei, who have a distubingly ambiguous mommy-boy relationship. (They're not actually related, thank goodness.) Jannis has captured Taiyo and Kei for the 1 million credit reward money, but then Taiyo decides to show Jannis what he's learned about using her pressure points to make her feel good (and making her clothes miraculously disappear), in this sequence:

I especially like the robots having robot-sex while they watch the humans. Too bad Jannis has her own weird quirk: if she reaches orgasm, she turns into a ferocious killer beastie: