Peter Blood, Bachelor Of Medicine And Several Other Things Besides
June 24, 2007 by Elijah
Ahoy there, shipmates! Readers hopping aboard the Spotted Dog need their wits about them to confound the mind-boggling riddles and bewildering puzzles Mam Spamme sets, as she tells the story of her quest to win a great fortune and free Captain Blood from dastardly Red Roger’s dungeon. With her son Sam, Black Dog and the Rat Crew helping, there’s no doubt she’ll succeed. It’s yo ho ho all the way!
Were I more of a knee-jerk elitist I would say that Sabatini is rolling in his grave. As it is, I’ll simply elect to suggest that he’s probably laughing at this uninformed little misappropriation of Captain Blood. Certainly not worth being angry at, but rather hilarious, to me at least. Nowhere near as irritating as trying to listen to this anyway. Ah, the joys of public domain.
(That dog looks pretty bad-ass, though.)
Have you listened to to the 1937 radio version of Captain Blood? Much more fun than even a professionally-recorded book on tape.
1937? I don’t think so. There’s a radio version of the movie as an extra on the DVD (although that probably means that, like the movie, it skips the best part of the book and feels rushed) but I never heard of one from a few years later.
It’s probably the one on the DVD — it was made by the Lux Radio Theater a couple of years after the movie came out, and it features Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. (A two year gap isn’t that unusual — Lux’s version of The Wizard of Oz came out in 1950.) It follows the movie in plot, but it’s fun, and there are soap advertisements, and it’s about twenty times more listenable than any audiobook.
Pfft, no Basil Rathbone? Worthless, I say. (Joking, naturally.) I think that is the one on the DVD then, I’ll have to give it a listen.