A new wood kit for the Professor

I've never been to Disneyland (where the full-size "ship" resides), and it's been years since I've watched the Disney movie.  As I understand it, though, the old Revell kit, which has recently been re-released under the name "Caribbean Pirate Ship" (note that there's no direct reference to the Disney movie "Pirates of the Caribbean"; presumably Revell-Monogram didn't pay any licensing fee), is a reasonably accurate scale model of the ship (or whatever it is) at Disneyland.  Here's a photo of that kit:  http://www.revell.com/catalog/products/1_72_Scale_Caribbean_Pirate_Ship-840-2.html

I have to say I see quite a few differences between this thing and the Occre kit.  The numbers of gunports and the sheerlines are different.  But there does seem to be a certain family resemblance. 

The bottom line is that neither of these kits constitutes, by any reasonable definition, a scale model of a real ship.  (Though the Revell effort apparently is a remarkably accurate reproduction of an amusement park prop - which, in its defense, is all it was originally intended to be.)  I note that the Model Expo site actually offers two Occre kits that supposedly represent warships of the Armada.  (The other one, labeled "San Martin," doesn't look any better.)  I've never seen an Occre kit in person, but on the basis of photos it looks to me like one more HECEPOB company.  Caveat emptor.

Incidentally, I was interested to find out (in a fine book called Under the Black Flag, by David Cordingly) that Peter Pan didn't originate as a book but as a stage play.  Apparently the original production was pretty spectacular; it featured a giant reducing lens, suspended from the ceiling, that made Tinkerbell look fairy-sized.  The play was such a hit that the author, James Barrie, later turned it into a novel.  The movie "Finding Neverland," with Johnnie Depp as Barrie and Dustin Hoffman as the owner of the theater (note the two interesting piratical connections), is very much worth watching. 

And I highly recommend Mr. Cordingly's book.  He used to be a curator at the National Maritime Museum, in Greenwich; he was largely responsible for that institution's blockbuster exhibition on piracy back in the early nineties.  Having long ago gotten my fill of "arrrrghs," "shiver me timbers," and the Queen Anne's Revenge, I'm normally pretty immune to the public fascination with pirates.  But that exhibition infected me to the point that, at my wife's urging, I walked out of the museum gift shop with an inflatable plastic parrot on my shoulder.  (The parrot subsequently disappeared.  I suspect one of my kids was the culprit.)

That's the ship indeed; the full size version at Disneyland was a favorite of mine when I was a kid. It was actually a restaurant, called the Chicken of the Sea for its sponsor. It's gone now, along with Skull Rock and the other Peter Pan themed elements, but the Yesterland website has a section on it:

http://www.yesterland.com/pirateship.html

As a cartoon ship it was actually pretty good. Disney's creative staff knew how to combine elements and get an evocative result, and it was perfect for what it did. And old Revell versions of Captain Hook's Pirate Ship still show up on ebay every now and then, although painting the new "Carribean Pirate Ship" version in its original Hook livery would be all that's necessary to make one. Its just interesting to see it extrapolated into a larger, and far more expensive wooden ship, and marketed as an actual vessel. Caveat emptor.

Thanks for the reference on David Cordingly's book Under the Black Flag. I havent seen it and imagine it would be very illuminating. The classic age of piracy is a little later than my general interest, but I did pick up the Osprey New Vanguard edition of The Pirate Ship 1660-1730, which seems worth it's modest cost for the nuts and bolts descriptions of the ships and contemporary illustrations of smaller, often overlooked vessels of the time. The modern reconstructions of various vessels seem more or less reasonable to their type, more so than some of the other booklets in the same series, but I would defer to others on modern ships like these.

The infectious part is understandable, its tempting to take on a model of some small fast sloop, but I'm not sure I'd ever have the courage to wear an inflatable parrot.