With the success of Mutiny on the Bounty (and the death of Will Rogers the year before), Clark Gable became the nation's number one male star at the box office. The only star more popular than he was Shirley Temple.

Charles Laughton's performance as Captain Bligh became a staple among impressionists. Although proud of the film and his performance, the actor eventually soured on his identification with the role. He would later say, "It's got so that every time I walk into a restaurant I get not only soup but an impersonation of Captain Bligh."

Although they had been dating for months, Joan Crawford had hesitated to marry Franchot Tone because her first marriage, to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., had ended partly because her career had eclipsed his. With the success of Mutiny on the Bounty, she finally agreed to marry the film's third-billed star.

In 1940, director Frank Lloyd announced plans to film Captain Bligh, a sequel about the captain's later career, in which his behavior inspired another mutiny, this time in an Australian penal colony. Laughton was slated to re-create the role, but the film was never made. In 1945, the Hollywood Reporter announced that Charles Nordhoff had written a sequel about Fletcher Christian's later career, based on the rumors that rather than dying on Pitcairn Island he had returned to England in disguise. Clark Gable was announced for the film, but it too was never made.

In Friz Freleng's 1950 Warner Bros. cartoon "Mutiny on the Bunny," Yosemite Sam plays a sadistic sea captain eventually toppled by a mutinous Bugs Bunny. Bugs had delivered his own impersonation of Laughton's Captain Bligh a year earlier in Buccaneer Bunny.

When cast members visited the White House for a special screening of the film, they gave President Franklin Roosevelt a model of the Bounty used for special effects shots. It now resides in the Roosevelt Museum in Hyde Park.

In 1957, Luis Marden, diving near Pitcairn Island, discovered the wreckage of the Bounty. He had cufflinks made from nails he salvaged from the ship.

MGM remade Mutiny on the Bounty in 1962, with Marlon Brando as Fletcher Christian and Trevor Howard as Captain Bligh. Partly because of Brando's outlandish on-set behavior, which dragged production out to nine months, and partly because of creative accounting (the studio charged the rights fee paid to Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall for the 1935 film to the remake's budget), the film came in at a then-high budget of $19 million. It lost $10 million at the box office, triggering a decade-long box-office decline for its star.

During location shooting, Brando sought out Gable's leading lady from the 1935 film, Movita. They married in 1960, and she bore him two children. Two years later they divorced, he married Tarita, who played Movita's role in the remake.

In a 1973 episode of the comedy series Sanford and Son, Redd Foxx joined the long list of Laughton imitators by doing his own version of the actor's Captain Bligh.

In the '70s, director David Lean and writer Robert Bolt devoted several years to working on a version of the Bounty story. Conceived on an epic scale, the story was to have spanned two films released in successive years. The projected expense was so high Warner Bros. withdrew from the project.

In 1984, Orion released the Dino De Laurentiis production The Bounty, starring Mel Gibson as Christian and Anthony Hopkins (who had been considered for Lean's version) as Bligh. The film was not technically a remake, as it was based on Richard Hough's book Captain Bligh and Mr. Christian. Bolt wrote the screenplay. Although hailed as the most historically accurate depiction of the mutiny, the film did not perform well at the U.S. box office.

The Simpsons featured a parody of Mutiny on the Bounty in the 2006 episode "The Wettest Stories Ever Told," with Principal Skinner as Captain Bligh.

by Frank Miller