Trailer Tuesday: The Pirate Movie

I’m sending you back to 1982 via Trailer Tuesday with The Pirate Movie, a musical loosely based on Gilbert and Sullivan’s “comic opera,” The Pirates of Penzance. You remember 1982. It was the year of the Tylenol cyanide scare, the first artificial heart transplant and the year Michael Jackson’s Thriller sold 20 million albums to become the biggest selling record ever.

Me? I had just turned 8 years-old and had spent that summer crying at E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, crapping my Underoos out of fear in Poltergeist and watching Rocky whoop Mr. T’s mohawk hairdo into submission in Rocky III. And just so we’re clear, 1982 was all the year of The Beastmaster, Blade Runner, Creepshow, Conan the Barbarian, The Dark Crystal, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Gandhi, The Man from Snowy River, An Officer and a Gentleman, Porky’s, The Secret of NIMH, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, Tex, The Thing, Timerider, Tootsie and Tron, to name a few.

I’m 100 percent sure I didn’t see The Pirate Movie in theaters, but I’m fairly certain I caught in on HTN or HBO a gazillion times and was head over heels in love with Kristy McNichol (she played Buddy on ABC’s Family from 1976 to 1980). When she sang “Hold On,” I was in rapture, especially with that low-cut dress. In fact, there were many memorable tunes in The Pirate Movie, including Christopher Atkins’ (The Blue Lagoon) snappy ballad, “How Can I Live Without Her,” and the entire cast performing the movie’s grand finale, “Happy Ending.”

Check out the trailer below and if you want to whisk away to a time when synth-heavy, pop-musicals were all kinds of awesome (Oh yeah, you know damn well if you were born in the 70s you loved Xanadu), I suggest you Netflix The Pirate Movie pronto.