Ahoy mate, today is Thursday, September 19. In case ye be forgetting, the day is also Talk Like A Pirate Day. I’ve never been particularly fond of pirate lingo, so I’ll go ahead and cut that stuff out right now, but if you are a fan of pirates and pirate talk, you should definitely make sure to catch the above teaser for Starz’s upcoming series Black Sails.
If there was any excuse for posting advertising for a pirate drama, Talk Like A Pirate Day would be it. The newest Black Sails clip takes us back to Talk Like a Pirate Day in 1715, a year in which pirates were apparently not as nuanced as they are today. The video mostly features a slew of dirty, uncouth men screaming, smirking, and cheering on ships. At the very end of the clip we get a moment with a pirate where he actually speaks some sort of proper English, asking “Beg Pardon?”
Black Sails is a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novel Treasure Island set a few decades before the big events in the book, back when pirates were largely unintelligable, apparently. It’s interesting that the series is trying to avoid “arrghs” and other slapstick vocabulary related to pirates. since Stevenson is largely the man who wrote many of the early pirate stereotypes we’ve come to know and love today (wooden peg legs and parrots, anyone?). Black Sails may be a prequel to the famous novel, but it seems as if the drama will be grittier and will simultaneously be more sexy.
In the wake of Spartacus, Starz is left without a drama that’s heavy on the action, and the subscription cable network has really been pushing Black Sails. The drama had a big presence at San Diego Comic-Con, putting up a large ship display, screening the pilot, and doing interviews. The screening went so well that Starz actually went ahead and greenlighted Black Sails for a second season, ahead of the show’s first season premiere.
The goofy, Talk Like A Pirate Day teaser doesn’t tell us much about the new series, but luckily, Starz has also put together a full trailer for the drama, which should go a little further to help viewers know whether or not this one will be worth a watch.
Black Sails is set to premiere on Starz sometime in January of 2014. We’ll let you know as soon as the subscription cable network announces an official premiere date. In the meantime, keep working on those deep-throated pirate noises.
