Disney Canon-Forgotten/Minor Characters #14: The Hot Water Pirate

Let’s fly to Neverland, folks! We are viewing Disney’s 14th animated feature film, “Peter Pan”. Released in 1953, the film was a commercial success after the somewhat failure, “Alice in Wonderland”.

The film’s story, again extremely well-known, is about a boy who doesn’t want to grow up named Peter Pan. He lives in a fantasy world called Neverland where he has fun with the Indians, talks with the mermaids, and battles the villain Captain Hook and his gang of pirates. After Peter Pan loses his shadow in the house of the Darling family,

he goes back to retrieve it and decides to bring the Darling children along to see Neverland. And that’s basically the story.

Now that I’m re-watching most of the films in the canon for this project, I actually find “Peter Pan” quite underwhelming. It’s not as fun as I remembered it, nor is Captain Hook as fun a villain as I remember. I guess after watching a masterpiece like “Cinderella” and a fun nonsensical adventure like “Alice in Wonderland”, “Peter Pan” just doesn’t live up to my expectations.

With that said, let’s go to the focus of this project of mine: the forgotten/minor characters. This movie was probably the hardest (tied with “Bambi”) to choose a forgotten/minor character because everyone is so darn memorable. The main cast is memorable, the Indians are memorable, the mermaids are memorable, the Lost Boys are memorable, the animals that are bumped into during the “Following the Leader” song are memorable, and the pirates are memorable. With that in mind, I decided I had to search for a forgotten/minor character in the pirate group. Surely some of them are less memorable than some. And while searching, I came up with 3 candidates for a forgotten/minor character.

The first is the pirate who’s singing on the mast about how great a pirate life is while playing an accordion.

He isn’t seen again and I thought this would be a good choice. But then I thought about the reason why he isn’t seen again.

Yeah, and that reason is extremely memorable, thereby making that pirate memorable too. So he was quickly struck out.

Another choice would be the pirate, Mr. Starkey.

Well, he was definitely a minor character, and I also liked the fact that he’s the only other pirate named besides Mr. Smee. But, much like the first choice, his dealings with Captain Hook are memorable, so he was quickly ruled out.

Sadly, I had to go with a third choice, which I didn’t really want to go with because there’s not much to say. This is the pirate who brings the hot water for Captain Hook after Hook catches a nasty cold. Yes, he isn’t really important. But for the sake of my project, I just HAD to go with him. This is similar to my choice of the yawning trees for “Fun and Fancy Free”, in the sense that this is mainly someone in the background who caught my attention as opposed to a major, but forgotten character or a minor, unmemorable one.

Summing up, the hot water pirate is my choice of the forgotten/minor character of this surprisingly disappointing film.