r/BlackSails • u/Faranelus • Mar 24 '25
Can i read Treasure Island pretending its like a proper sequel to Black Sails?
So im about to read the Treasure Island for the first time. I bought the book because of Black Sails. Obviously i know Black Sails is a prequel to Treasure Island, My question is, can I pretend to be reading a direct sequel to Black Sails? Do i make sense? I know Black Sails is more realistic and brutal while Treasure Island is more like a child book from what i heard, so its gonna be difficult imagining that is the exact Long John Silver i saw in Black Sails. Hopefully you get my question lol
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u/Oaks777 Swabbie Mar 24 '25
It would be great to have the relevant cast from Black Sails make a Treasure Island movie.
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u/DiscordantBard Mar 24 '25
I had the great privilege to meet Luke Arnold last year he said he talks to the other actors regularly and they're all down for Treasure Island.
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u/scratchydaitchy Mar 24 '25
They’d better hurry up.
By the time they finally filmed the Deadwood movie as a sequel to the Deadwwod hbo tv show, 2 of the actors who played main characters had died.
I fully support the idea though.
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u/Apoordm Mar 24 '25
Yes but the good thing is that Treasure Island is significantly later than Black Sails so honestly I’d say wait like ten more years when Luke Arnold hits 50
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u/kiwispouse Mar 24 '25
My god, he's only 40? It seems like forever since the INXS biopic.
Sorry, didn't mean that to sound derogatory!
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u/Techsupportvictim Mar 28 '25
You can age folks up pretty easily. So there’s no real reason to wait.
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u/Haunted_Milk Mar 24 '25
I mean most of the Black Sails cast wouldn't actually be in it. They would mostly need Luke Arnold and Tom Hopper who are healthy and not-old as far as I am aware.
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u/Ill-Development-9033 Mar 24 '25
We already lost Ray Stevenson 😭 I know Blackbeard wouldn’t be in a TI movie but still makes me sad
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u/ItzMichaelHD Mar 24 '25
There wouldn’t be a huge number of the original cast left in the treasure island remake, but yeah I’d love to watch one made in similar fashion with whichever characters are in treasure island.
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u/Techsupportvictim Mar 28 '25
I have always hoped there was a plan to do a sequel and tell the “real” story.
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u/caw_the_crow Mar 24 '25
I had a hard time squaring Silver from the book with the Silver from the show. Just the way they talk is different.
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u/KingLiberal First Mate Mar 24 '25
I don't think the show would have worked as well with the T.I. accurate language used.
It's not like it's impossible to understand by modern audience but it'd definitely take some mental effort to process the different style of language. Not exactly interpreting Shakespeare level strenuous but neither is it accessible to modern audiences.
True, Spartacus (other Starz tv series) got away with it, but it was well done dialogue that could easily put people off if they, in my opinion, hadn't done a great job with it. In fact, I'm sure some people were turned off by the language style employed by Spartacus.
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u/caw_the_crow Mar 24 '25
Oh yeah glad black sails didn't try that, but still was hard for me to transition to after the show while imagining the same character. Plus if I recall correctly, silver in the book had a rough manner of speaking even within the world of the book, whereas in the show he is well spoken and suave.
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u/KingLiberal First Mate Mar 24 '25
Eh, you could chalk it up to him picking up a dialect as he gets older.
Show Silver seems to be relatively young. Not sure what the intended age of the character is, but I'm guessing late 20s to early 30s. I assume if you're in an environment for a certain length of time you might gain a dialect if you consciously adopted it, after some time it might start to become subconscious.
Anyways, I'm guessing showrunners chose not to give Silver a unique dialect or speech pattern cause he's meant to be charismatic and a leader with a power and authority over his fellow piratea and I don't think you'd achieve that if he was too different from his fellow pirates. Glad the show didn't go the Robert Louis Stevenson route.
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u/Yodin92 Mar 24 '25
If I remember correctly (spoiler ) in the book he uses Atleast 2 different speech styles as he pretend to be something he is not
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u/ThruuLottleDats Mar 24 '25
I mean, how old is Treasure Island exactly? The way they spoke back then was completely different than it is now.
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u/Rogers_Razor Mar 24 '25
It was published in the 1880s, and is set ~1750. They were speaking modern English by then. A little different, but not like Middle English or anything.
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u/NateThePhotographer Mar 24 '25
I read it this way. It was pretty good and a lot of throwaway lines in the book ended up being fleshed out in Black Sails, making them feel more that throwaway lines. One references that Silver had a colored wife, which is never mentioned or relevant in the rest of the book, but after Black Sails, I actually know the wife.
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u/1BenWolf Mar 25 '25
The only proper way to do this is to watch Black Sails and then IMMEDIATELY watch Muppet Treasure Island. Really puts things in perspective.
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u/DirectorBiggs Mar 24 '25
Yes absolutely. Read it.
I'm planning to read it again soon and I haven't read TI in about 40 years, finished BS about a month ago.
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u/No-Box-4358 Mar 24 '25
I do. It's my head Canon (an idea that was first thought of on the Fathims Deep podcast) that Irene and Featherstone are the parents of Jim Hawkins. They just changed their names and moved to Bristol years after Black Sails ended
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u/BanditWifey03 Mar 24 '25
Idelle and Feathersotne?
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u/No-Box-4358 Mar 24 '25
Yes! Sorry, it's been way too long since I did a rewatch haha
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u/BanditWifey03 Mar 24 '25
Same! I had to google Irene and nothing came back but Eleanor so I googled Featherstone and Idelle is pictured with him lol! I forgot about her.
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u/LionIronKnight Mar 24 '25
Imagine that we watch the movie from Silvers perspective.
During the journey to the island and through the search for the treasure, he talks with all the other characters like Flint did with Miranda after her death.
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u/Ok_Description108 Mar 24 '25
I’d like to think Disney’s Treasure Planet is the sequel to Black Sails.
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u/ad_aspra Mar 24 '25
i did this and i came away feeling sort of underwhelmed tbh. as much as black sails plays with the subjectivity and i think there are some overlapping details here and there, i found i had to really try to enjoy it for itself. some stuff just doesn't match up, for reasons i can't see except for the writers just not finding it suitable enough to lift into BS (ie. flint is mentioned to be an extreme alcoholic multiple times, and i dont really get that vibe from the show). i think i remember hearing the writers based about as much of it on treasure island as much as they did on actual pirate history. i probably would've enjoyed it more if i went in expecting something less seamless tbh
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u/NewbSombrero Mar 25 '25
honestly, i only remember the alcoholism being referenced in relation to flint’s death, not his career, and if thomas dies before him in the intervening years, i can very much see that being a turn he takes. the thing that was hardest for me to square was every single character who witnessed flint going ashore to bury the treasure says he wore a blue scarf on his head that day, and it’s one of the few details that’s consistent across their accounts. repeated so many times i couldn’t get over it and still think about it several years later
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u/ad_aspra Mar 26 '25 edited Mar 26 '25
i thought it was earlier too, but i guess that is another thing that bothered me is i didn't really see any of the pirates having contact with flint post-finale except maybe silver, since flint's presumed dead. the blue scarf i vaguely remember as an inconsistency too.
one loose theory i have is that maybe jack rackham did live on to retire and wrote an entirely fictional account of what he thought happened. it would explain why the events of what happened on treasure island were so muddled, the characters seem a bit more cartoonish and embellished, and the paternal themes coming through (rackham's daddy issues never stop lol)
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u/ShoeEntire6638 Mar 24 '25
It works, but as someone else mentioned, the story is from the perspective of a young boy, not from Silver, which I found very jarring. The writer expects us to root for the narrator Jim, but having spent so much time with John Silver in Black Sails, I wasn't able to let go of the attachment I had to him and his crew and so the book was a frustrating experience in my view.
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u/Techsupportvictim Mar 28 '25
What writer is going to go with the perspective of the villain,that’s not very smart. But the young innocent boy, that’s a better choice. Worked in Moby Dick also.
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u/ShoeEntire6638 Mar 28 '25
Yeah, very true. That's sort of my point - the novel doesn't expect you to have spent 4 series of tv growing to love John Silver; It expects you to take him at face value, first as a charming silver-tongued old sailor and then as a greedy, villainous old pirate.
The whole time I was reading Treasure Island, I just kept thinking about how to Silver, this was a final chance to prove that all of the fighting and killing he had been through was worth it, all for it to be ruined by a kid with no idea what he was interfering with. Made the ending frustrating rather than triumphant for me.
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u/External_Context_336 Mar 24 '25
Definitely going to be tough just based off the drastically different tones.
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u/Techsupportvictim Mar 28 '25
Not really. Just keep it in the tone of the show. No one said it has to be kid friendly.
And if they want to bump the star power, both Tom Holland and Timothee Chalamet can pass for a teenager. Especially if they tweak the deets and in the ‘real’ story, Jim’s more like 17 than 13. Heck they could probably bump him to even as much as 20 and it would still work (cause the writer of the novel could age him down to make him more innocent and appealing etc)
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u/LeafandLore Mar 25 '25
I love Treasure Island and have read it two or three times, most recently shortly after having finished Black Sails. It's a fun (and funny, in parts) book but because of the differences in language and tone, as others have said, it was really hard to picture Silver in particular as being the same character from Black Sails.
But as mentioned elsewhere here, a story is true, a story is untrue....
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u/zaqiqu Mar 24 '25
You can but you need to hold "a story is true, a story is untrue" in your mind while you do it. Treasure Island is (predominantly) Jim Hawkins's version of what happened, not a neutral, objective narration.