Posted on 09/18/2020 3:28:04 PM PDT by Capt. Tom
The blockbuster film Jaws has been a perennial favorite here on Martha’s Vineyard since its release 45 years ago.
The epic 1975 feature film, shot on the Vineyard in iconic places like the picturesque fishing village of Menemsha, pits a fictional seaside tourist town called Amity against a villainous great white shark whose fearsome triangular teeth—300 of them—bite and kill unsuspecting townspeople and summer visitors enjoying the local Atlantic Ocean waters.
Jaws played recently at a COVID-safe drive-in theater here, allowing viewers to scream in the privacy of their own cars.
The movie took a deep dive into the psyche of audiences—and ocean swimmers—creating a larger-than-life fictional movie monster that evoked perpetual fear of the great white shark.
“The book and film exaggerated the white shark’s behavior. The white shark in the film was far larger than normal—about 25 feet—while the largest animals in the wild are typically 15 to 18 feet,” says Greg Skomal, a fisheries biologist and well-known shark expert with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries.
When Jaws came out, “relatively little was known about the white shark. We know a lot more now about white shark ecology, distribution and natural history,” says Skomal. Studies of the white shark species, Carcharodon carcharias, show its critical role in keeping the marine ecosystem in balance, exerting top-down forces on the food web that help hold other ocean species in check.
Nonetheless, when attacks do occur, they draw incredible publicity. In July, a wetsuit-wearing 63-year-old woman swimming in the chilly Gulf of Maine waters was killed by a great white shark—the first such death in Maine’s history. In September 2018, a 26-year-old man boogie boarding off Massachusetts’ Cape Cod was killed by a shark, the first shark attack fatality in the state since 1936.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
/adds this to her list of Things To Never Do
:D
The difference between seventies and eighties popular fiction is night and day.
I missed that one, I reckon.
I do recall The Amityville Horror, The Exorcist and Sophie’s Choice.
When she wasn’t shoving her book choices at me, I was happily reading Bradbury, instead.
Yes, and the movie was also set in NE.
And Hooper died.
I decided one year to read seventies fiction as I was too young to read it when it first came out. I found out I had not missed much.
There were some good mysteries and some really good Sci-Fi. But romance was either so sweet it gave you cavities or bed hoppers extraordinaire. Let's not even get into the the horror. And then there was the general fiction novels. Let's just say that by the end of the book I was generally cheering for everyone to die a horrible death.
I almost did that in another movie.
Many years ago when I was traveling I had some car trouble I had to have it fixed immediately.
I was in a small town down south I dropped it off to be fixed and went to the local movie theater to kill the time while it was being repaired.
The movie MASH was playing and I had no idea what it was about.
After abut 15 minutes into MASH I was upset and was thinking about walking out-they think soldiers in Korea getting crippled maimed and suffering horrible injuries is funny.
Then I realized the only way the doctors and nurses in the surgical hospital could keep their sanity faced with these horrible ongoing medical disasters was to act like they did. So I stayed. -Tom
HA!! That’s Great.
A one horned flying purple people eater?
LOLOL
It’s a movie and entertaining...why don’t they talk about the science of the Sharknado movies?
“Shark attacks have occurred up the Mississippi River to Minnesota and on the Great Lakes. Far up rivers on the Gulf & East Coast rivers.”
I can guess they were not great whites. Possibly bulls as they have displayed a capacity for fresh water and to my knowledge, the only shark large enough to attack in the USA rivers and lakes. There are 8 types of sharks that can live in fresh water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshwater_shark
Most of them don’t look like a shark we have grown accustomed to and most live on the other side of the world from us in Asia and Australia. A good article for why on this is:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/01/sharks-sink-fresh-water
rwood
I don't think the 1916 shark turned around and went after one of the men who fed it a ham from a dock, which I suspect was one of the more incredible scenes that Benchley was referring to.
Eek! When people mention strange monsters I think of Woody Allen’s question about futuristic monsters lurking in the woods - with the body of a crab and the head of a social worker.
Nice. I enjoy those old monster movies.
Go ahead and live in bliss until a sharknado comes to Iowa.
I will check this out; thank you.
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