MORE DUELING HOOKS

Hey kids, what time is it? Ten points to Gryffindor if you said it's time for Captain Hook!

Sure, James M Barrie's enduring pirate captain may be 110 years old (or more, if you subscribe to my version of the character in Alias Hook, where he's been frozen in time—at age 43—since 1724). But the time has never been more right for the witty, sardonic old rogue, who's enjoying something of a mini-Renaissance right this minute.

Over on TV's Once Upon A Time, we have the handsome young leather-clad incarnation of the character played for a couple of seasons now by Colin O'Donoghue. It seems like this Captain Hook (aka Killian Jones) was brought in at the beginning of the second season chiefly as a villainous adversary to Robert Carlyle's Rumplestiltskin/Mr. Gold character.

But viewer response to the sexy Irishman was so positive, this Hook has since been promoted to the role of principal love interest to the show's nominal heroine, Emma Swan. But Emma's love interests have an unfortunate way of ending up dead—remember the handsome sheriff who had his traitor's heart squished (literally) by the evil queen? Remember Pinocchio?—which may be why Emma's been so standoffish.

Still, last night, with calamity looming (calamity is always looming in this show), Killian/Hook got another chance to plant a big smooch on Emma. That gurgling sound you may have heard was millions of women all over America melting over their remotes.

Meanwhile, Hook is coming back to the big screen in a big way in next summer's Pan. The movie won't be out for seven more months, but official studio portraits of the main characters were released this week.

No doubt inspired by the popularity of the OUaT character, the producers went with a younger vibe for their Hook, as played by Garrett Hedlund. In what purports to be an origin story of Peter Pan,  the boy Peter is whisked off to the Neverland, where he falls in with the notorious pirate, Blackbeard—one of whose crewmembers is the youthful James Hook. Apparently, the two of them team up to save Neverland from their lunatic boss. (Played by Hugh Jackman, from whom I'm expecting plenty of  scenery-chomping brio!)

I'm not sure what time period—if any—the movie is meant to be set in. That flintlock Hedlund is grasping looks appropriate to the Blackbeard era, although not so his clothing or his haircut. Doesn't he seem a tad neatly coifed for a pirate?

As I mentioned in a previous post, J. M. Barrie says in his novel, Peter And Wendy, that James Hook once sailed with Blackbeard, so I suppose the storyline isn't all that far-fetched. It's Hook becoming allies with that infernal boy I may not be able to swallow; but I suppose it's all in the telling.

And then, this Thursday (Dec 4), batten down the hatches for Peter Pan Live, an in-studio production of the venerable stage musical to be broadcast live to a TV screen near you.  And speaking of venerable, the intrepid Christopher Walken—iconoclast that he is—is going against the youth-vibe trend to bring seasoned menace to the role of Captain Hook.

A veteran hoofer from way back (remember him tap-dancing on the bar in Pennies From Heaven?), Walken also promises to bring a bit of the ol' soft-shoe to the deck of Hook's ship. (It's a musical, remember?)

I can't say that any of these gentlemen are exactly my vision of James Hook. But I'll be cheering them all on, thrilled that the good captain continues to, er, carve out a place for himself in popular culture!

YO HO HO

Long before Captain Jack Sparrow came reeling out of the fervid imagination of Johnny Depp, there was Jack Shandy, reluctant pirate captain and hero of Tim Powers' gorgeous historical fantasy adventure, On Stranger Tides. Now that the folks at Disney have appropriated Powers' novel for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie (due on local screens Friday, or 11:59 tomorrow night, for the terminally obsessed), I thought it was time to put in a good word for the original book.

I first encountered On Stranger Tides in the spring of 1989, when this paperback cover leaped out at me from a shelf at the old Bookshop Santa Cruz. Back then, I was reading everything I could find about pirates, getting ready to write my own pirate novel, The Witch From the Sea. With its elements of dark magic, voudon (or "voodoo"), zombie pirate crews and the Fountain of Youth, you couldn't exactly classify Powers' book as strict historical research. But unlike the PotC movies, the novel is rooted in a very specific historical time and place—chiefly, the pirate island of New Providence in the Bahamas, ca. 1718. This was the year Governor Woodes Rogers came out from England to "reform" New Providence by buying off the pirates with the King's Pardon to give up the trade. It was also the last year in the short but spectacular career of Ed Teach, aka Blackbeard.

Even though Powers' book is set a century before mine, I started reading it for its realistic depiction of the pirate life on board ship and ashore. But pretty soon I was devouring it for its lush, and simmering sense of magical forces bubbling just under the surface of real life (and history). Powers contends that magic has run its course in the Old World, but is still viable in some wild, remote regions of the New World, where it has not yet been civilized out of existence. The "Fountain of Youth" at the heart of his story does not restore youth; rather it's a power spot of dark sorcery where the living can be made immortal, and the dead resurrected (albeit zombie-style).

The action gallops from New Providence to Port-au-Prince on Hispaniola (now Haiti), to Kingston, Jamaica. Young Englishman and puppeteer John Chandagnac is sailing into the Caribbees to claim a family inheritance when his ship is captured by pirates in league with Blackbeard. They are there to rendezvous with another passenger, Hurwood, an elderly Oxford don and magical scholar who's en route to the Fountain; maddened by the death of his wife, he's planning to resurrect her in the body of his nubile young daughter, Beth. Determined to save Beth, Chandagnac joins the pirate crew, who rechristen him "Jack Shandy," and after several raucous adventures in which his desperation or sheer foolhardiness are mistaken for bravery, he's elected their captain.

The centerpiece of the story is a hair-raising trip to the eerie, demon-haunted Fountain in the company of Blackbeard himself, the only man who's ever been to the Fountain and come out again. (Hurwood needs the pirate to show him the way.) I just love how Powers seeds his supernatural plot so plausibly into what is historically known about Teach. According to Powers, he didn't do the immortality rituals properly the first time, and came away troubled by phantoms and ghosts—which neatly explains Blackbeard's historically well-known nuttiness and rages. Powers also suggests that Blackbeard engineered his own "death" in that famous fight with Lt. Maynard (which occurs in the book) in order to come back in a completely new—and immortal—identity. How does this ruse play out? Read the book and find out! (Shop local: pick up a copy at Bookshop Santa Cruz , or Capitola Book Cafe.)

One shudders to think how the PotC franchise will adulterate this material. Parts of the book seem tailor-made for the series, what with all those pirates getting killed and resurrected as zombies. There's even a sea battle between two historically correct ghost ships, the Charlotte Bailey and the Nuestra Señora di Lagrimas, resurrected from the bottom of the sea with their phantom crews when a magic spell goes astray.

We also know in advance that Blackbeard appears in the movie (although this time, he's the one with the daughter), and the plot evidently revolves around the Fountain of Youth. But the mermaids who figure so prominently in the movie PR are not to be found in Powers' story at all. And how are they going to insert Jack Sparrow into all of this? We can only hope the PotC brain trust rises to the occasion with a movie that's worthy of Powers' book, Depp's marvelously loony creation, and the eager viewing audience.

In the meantime, if you find yourself in the mood for more buccaneer action, check out my pirate movie review page. (Yes, that's me over there, in full yo-ho-ho regalia.) Granted, this personal and eclectic list doesn't include every entry in the genre, but there's still plenty to choose from, good, bad, and ugly, vintage or contemporary, from Anne Of the Indies to Yellowbeard. Cruise around and enjoy!