Yarrrrrr! My Pirates score be three. Three be my score, and three be its rank, and three be the number of testicles on a mutated Alsatian boarhound. Yarrrrrr!

I'll tell you something about Vampirates that you probably didn't know: it's set in the 26th Century. WTF? Oh, and also, it's terrible. I mean, I know it's written for ten-year-olds but apparently it's written for the ten-year-olds who sit in the back of the bus inhaling all the fumes. I'll tell you, unless this 26th-C thing pans out in a big way I'm going to have to give it a fail, because why would you set a tale of vampire pirates in anything but the mythic past? Roundabout when King Kong came out, Matty "Neuschwanstein" Price pointed out (for it is in the text of the film itself) that you can only set stories like this in the human past, pre-1945, the last time in our history that the earth still contained "blank spaces on the map." World's End is a bit about that, too ("The immaterial is now immaterial" / "The world's the same, there's just less in it"). There's an untraceable human past where it was/is still psychologically possible to believe in the fantastic, an option that the present now closes to us. Efforts were made in the late 80s and early 90s to position the deep sea (The Abyss, SeaQuest) as the next uncharted frontier where the real can still intersect with the mystical and the fantastic, but really, the only one remaining is interstellar space (Star Wars), and even that is a reach of the imagined version overcoming the known reality of space flight. Joseph Campbell would have something to say (in fact, probably did say something) about the fact that we exist for the first time in our history where the mystical cannot be found or imagined anywhere in our cosmological sphere, and that's either a serious potential problem for our psyches, or a major turning point in our evolution. We've been far enough up in the air to know that heaven ain't up there, and far enough down in the ground to disprove the traditional location of hell, too. And the chances of being attacked by a werewolf or sailing with vampirates seems similarly null. Phillip Pullman solved the problem with parallel worlds, but they're a bit thin on potential since one can't imagine ever actually going there. I don't need heaven or hell to get by, thank you very much, but I wouldn't mind being able to trick myself into believing there's a Kraken or two still swimming around out there.

Which is why Japanese whalers finding giant squids is cool. The end.