Thursday, March 11, 2010
5:46 AM
Duh-Duhn......
Jaws was THE "event" movie of my childhood. Why? I couldn't tell you. I guess just because it was something new. Everybody had to go and see it. It was hailed as the scariest movie in cinematic history. It did not live up to that hype. We kids did enjoy going to see it together though and we all pretended to be just as scared as the industry wanted us to be because....well.....we were 13 and we had nothing better to do on a Friday night after football and basketball ended. lol It was an o.k. movie. It had it's moments of shock value but for the most part, we all just joked from scene to scene about who was surely going to get eaten next. Here in O*******, there are no beaches or oceans so I think that had a lot to do with us feeling quite ridiculously removed from the fear that this movie promised to bring to it's audiences. There are no sharks in Lake Mc******* or Lake E****** and those were the only two bodies of water that any of us had any plans of visiting. (I was 19 before I finally got to see an ocean up close and personal for the first time. Actually that was the only time I've seen an ocean up close. I dont' come from a family of world travelers, to say the least.)
The movie was a huge hit in America and so it yielded all kinds of movie-related merchandise that was quickly marketed to us kids. The holy grail of all of that was the famous Jaws t-shirt. There have been others since then but the original was a light blue, tid-dye sort of design with the movie logo on the front. I had one and I wish I had hung onto it because an authentice vintage Jaws shirt is probably worth a nice little chunk of change today.