Sky Pirates

We produce a number of Sky Pirate action figures, toys, posters, games, and literature inspired by various pieces of film and literature from the turn of the 20th century. These toys are about history, the future, what we’ve lost, and what we can gain. They are testaments to the concept of Revolutionary Joy, and the idea that even the concept of play can be radical.

What makes a Sky Pirate?

The sky pirate emerges at a specific historical moment: the final decades of the nineteenth century, when the conquest of the air shifted from fantasy to imminent reality. These stories were never merely about technology, from the very beginning the image of the airship hovering above cities, beyond the reach of police or military, became a canvas for revolutionary imagination.

What could be more intoxicating than the idea of a machine that frees its occupants from the grounded order of nation-states, borders, and class hierarchy? The works that inspired us span from Jules Verne’s visionary inventors to Soviet animators dreaming of interplanetary revolution, from German dime novels to Italian silent films featuring gender-fluid pirate captains. 

What unites them is a shared recognition: the sky pirate is not just an adventurer but a political figure. Whether an anarchist bomber, charismatic liberator, or worker-organizer among the clouds, these characters embody the dream of seizing the means of production and taking it airborne.

Technology is a force multiplier, it can be a tool for revolution or oppression. The airship, in these works, is occasionally both.

Where can I learn more?

Here’s a short list of Sky Pirate and Sky Pirate-adjacent film and literature available from us, our partners, or the larger internet.

These works span four decades, three continents, and countless technological transformations. What unites them is a shared conviction: that the sky is not the exclusive domain of states and capitalists, that flight can be seized by those below, that the airship can become a vessel of liberation rather than control.

The sky pirate tradition is not monolithic. It contains anarchist bombers and feminist adventurers, Soviet collectives and queer outlaws, dime-novel inventors and pulp avengers. But across this diversity runs a common thread: the belief that technology, in the right hands, can overturn the established order.

We who produce these toys make no claim to neutrality. We stand with the pirates. We believe that another world is possible, and that it may be reached by climbing, by flying, by seizing the means of ascent and pointing them toward the horizon.

We’ve found inspiration among these stories, to write and tell our own stories, to make toys, and to create a new world. 

Keep watching the skies.