The piracy debate
``Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest " opened to a record-setting weekend at the box office. (How much, exactly, is $132 million in doubloons?) Keira Knightley is very pretty. So's Orlando Bloom . The special effects are great. But the reason all those tickets got sold is Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow .
With ``Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl ," Depp had already earned Sparrow an honored (if somewhat dazed) place in the pirate canon. He's now up there with Captain Kidd , Blackbeard , Jean Lafitte , Long John Silver , Captain Hook , and ``The Pirates of Penzance ."
Pop! has its own pirate favorites. None sailed the Spanish Main, but all wielded a pretty mean cutlass -- or baseball bat, as the case might be.
No one has ever buckled a swash quite so well as Errol Flynn in 1935's ``Captain Blood" (above) and ``The Sea Hawk" (1940). Burt Lancaster , in ``The Crimson Pirate " (1952), is a distant second (inset left). And while not in the same league as Flynn, Lancaster, or Depp, Yul Brynner (as Lafitte) memorably goes ego-to-ego with Charlton Heston (as Andrew Jackson ) in ``The Buccaneer" (1958) .
America's most famous pirates haven't robbed ships. They've played baseball. There have been many celebrated Pittsburgh Pirates -- Honus Wagner , Pie Traynor , Willie Stargell , the young Barry Bonds . (Strangely enough, it was only after Bonds left the Pirates for the Giants that he became truly piratical, pharmaceutically speaking.) But our Pirate pick is Roberto Clemente.
Football has raiders in Oakland and buccaneers in Tampa Bay. The pigskin-pirate nod goes to Tampa Bay Buccaneer defensive lineman Lee Roy Selmon , who's not only the sole Hall of Famer his team has produced but also the namesake of the Lee Roy Selmon Crosstown Expressway , which connects Tampa and Brandon , Fla. Why walk the plank when you can drive the Selmon?
Also in Florida, there's Jimmy Buffett . That Parrothead nonsense got tired a long time ago. Still, Buffett earned a place on the list with his 1974 song ``A Pirate Looks at 40. " For better or worse, it's the ``Still Crazy After All These Years" of pirate songs.
In ``The Pirate" (1948), Gene Kelly is only a pretend pirate. But there's nothing pretend when he and the fabulous Nicholas Brothers loosen cannonade after cannonade on the dance floor in the movie's ``Be a Clown" finale.
Clowning pirates in finales? It's hard to top John Belushi's Bluto Blutarski (inset right) at the end of ``Animal House" (1978). He's the one screen pirate who's even funnier than Jack Sparrow -- and, unlike Jack, he gets the girl.
MARK FEENEY 
