Shiver me timbers, mateys!

There's something about a pirate adventure that stirs the imagination and triggers a sense of free-spirited adventure and derring-do. (That remains true even though the adult in us eventually learns that most pirates were murderous gangsters of the open seas.)

It's true in literature — and it's true in classic cinema, where such films as "Captain Blood," "The Sea Hawk," Disney's "Treasure Island" and even "Peter Pan" (with Captain Hook) forever elevate the Hollywood art of swashbuckling.

Once again, buccaneers are calling, because this week the second "Pirates of the Caribbean" film opens, and it's likely the franchise will continue to scoop up filmgoers' pieces of eight and gold doubloons by the hundreds of millions.

The first "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" single-handedly rejuvenated a nearly forgotten film genre when its estimated $305.4 million gross, according to the Internet Movie Database, made it the 21st most successful film of all time, placing it in the top three among the films of 2003.

Though box office records from Hollywood's golden age — the time of the great Errol Flynn — are hard to come by and difficult to compare, it's safe to say the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" film is the most successful movie to ever sail under the skull-and-crossbones.

In fact, it's a challenge to even name other pirate movies released over the last three decades. We'll help you with a few titles you may already have forgotten:

• "Cutthroat Island,'' the 1995 Renny Harlin adventure in which the director turned his wife of that time, Geena Davis, into a fetching pirate. The picture got mixed to poor reviews (I'm one of the few critics who liked it), and the estimated $92 million film earned only a meager $10 million at the box office, according to imdb.com.

• "The Pirate Movie,'' a truly awful 1982 rock 'n' roll parody of "The Pirates of Penzance," starring Kristy McNichol and Christopher Atkins, that almost single-handedly buried the pirate genre. Mercifully, its petty box office returns aren't readily available.

• "Pirates,'' a misguided Roman Polanski adventure from 1986 that somehow cast Walter Matthau as a pirate captain. He was one of our great comic actors, but it was asking way too much for him to play a swashbuckler. It cost $40 million to make, while its U.S. gross was a paltry $1.6 million, according to imdb.com.