JAWS turns 50! "You're gonna need a bigger boat"

Dr. Bob Thompson has the latest entertainment news and looks at the original release date of JAWS June 20th, 1970. Plus, another streaming milestone!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
And let's get over to the Legacy Retirement Group dot
Com phone line and say good morning to doctor Bob Thompson,
Professor of pop Culture at Syracuse University. So, Bob, we've
got about I don't know, six or seven days in
the nineties, like mid nineties here in Columbus. It'll feel
like one hundred with the humidity and all that. You
get into a pop of that warm weather in Syracuse.
Are you under the heat dome like us?

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Yeah, I think we're going to be, although right now
it's say glorious morning, but I don't think that's gonna
last for long. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
I think we're gonna be a little toasty here too,
So hopefully you can find some water and stay cool.
So the big story, doctor Bob, the fiftieth anniversary of
Jaws nineteen seventy five June twentieth. I think it costs
about forty five bucks to make, and which actually twelve
million dollars to make, which was way more than three

(00:50):
times its original budget and about four times the cost
of an average movie at that time.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Yeah, and we we're celebrating this fifty on the day itself.
It was the twentiest that it was released and yeah,
I mean it turned out to be an expensive movie,
but then it ended up grossing it the highest grossing
film ever, a record it only kept for a couple
of years because Star Wars was right in its rear

(01:18):
view mirror. It is kind of amazing to think of
those years when the Jaws movies came out in what
seventy five, seventy eight, and eighty three, followed by the
three Star Wars films that would kind of parallel parallel.
Those movies really did change in significant ways in those
few years thanks to those couple of films and a

(01:40):
few more. And of course, as everybody's pointing out, the
idea that we now think of as the summer blockbuster
was kind of matured and figured out, and the modern
form of it was really done was done by Jaws,
and then even into home video. The very first LaserDisc

(02:01):
released in North America, if anybody remembers laser discs, back
in nineteen seventy eight, was an edition of Jaws. So
you can actually take this thing home and watch it,
which in nineteen seventy eight was a big deal, And
of course they're now milking it for everything it's worth
Peacock's going to be playing all four of the film's

(02:25):
Major League Baseball today, tomorrow and the next day in
the Giants games and Yankees and Phillies. I think have
all this tie in stuff Tonight done. NBC Spielberg himself
will introduce a three hour playing of it. Fancy new
bluey ray releases and every possible from beach towels to

(02:46):
dolls to build a bears. If you can put a
shark on it, They've figured out how to do it.

Speaker 1 (02:53):
That's really impressive. Doctor Bob Johnson from Syracuse University, professor
of Pop Culture, a Guinness Book the World Record, says
they were the first movie. Jaws was the first movie
to hit one hundred million dollars in US box office
receipts at the time. It only took him about two
months to surpass The Godfather and The Exorcist, which were

(03:14):
both movies out while when Jaws came out and it
blew them out of the water. And you know, Jaws
is a speak is a classic obviously. Steven Spielberg says
that his favorite movie and what he thinks the best
movie of all time is is was The Godfather.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
Yeah, and it is no when you point out all
those films that were competing at the same time, it
is really an extraordinary list. And yeah, Godfathers on the
top of many people's lists, and even in Okay, So
in nineteen seventy five, the highest growthing films, Jaws was
number one. We talked about that. Number two one Flew

(03:52):
Over the Cuckoo's Nests. Not exactly a bad movie either. No,
Rocky Horror Pictures Show debuted that season or that year
as well, Tommy the Who adaptation. I mean, there were
a lot of great movies back then.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
Yeah, it certainly. And then you know, focusing in on
Jaws a little bit, I mean one of the greatest
opening scenes ever for a movie with the gall and
the water by herself. I mean, it's just you knew
something was going to happen, and boy did it, and
it did it in supreme fashion. It was unbelievable.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
You know, the speaking of that peacock, as well as
playing all four of the films and all of that.
You don't have they have those rows of scened stuff.
There's a whole row starting today called Trouble in the
Water where these are not Jaws movies, but movies essentially
that are like Jaws, Piranha, and all these kind of

(04:51):
other movies that weren't as good as Jaws. But bad
things also happened in the water.

Speaker 1 (04:55):
Well when you think about, you know what happened after
you know, the first couple of weeks of Jaws coming out,
and you know, people were wrapped around movie theaters to
go see this movie. The movie was so well done
and so well made. At the time, people were literally
afraid to go swimming, like in a lake where there
aren't any sharks. I mean, people probably didn't even want

(05:15):
to go into their pool at the time. They were
so afraid of the water.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
No, and you know, I remember that, and you know
it sounds like those are just stories and people weren't.
But people really were afraid back then. I mean there
was a sense that that movie totally transformed for quite
a while a lot of people's relationship to the water.
I mean, we'd had sharks. I remember a little kid
cartoons sharks were constantly attacking people and all that kind

(05:42):
of thing. But I don't think ever there was this
sense of fear of sharks that Jaws brought about in
a whole new way. And by the way, that music
I think had a lot to do with it. Oh yeah,
take away the soundtrack and that movie is a very
different thing.

Speaker 1 (05:59):
And I think that is that's been done where they
remove the music from that movie and they play it
and people are not nearly as scared as they watch it.
It's all about the audio in that one. Hey, that's it.

Speaker 2 (06:12):
And then that's become like the Twilight Zone scene. It's
become almost part of our language.

Speaker 1 (06:17):
Yeah, and it's been used in you know, any kind
of ominous situation. And you hear that come up one
of the other stories. And we talked about this a
little bit earlier in the week. For the first time ever,
streaming television has beat cable and broadcast television a cable
and broadcast combined. Streaming still beats it.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
Yeah, And of course we know the you know, the
streaming is obviously taken over. You and I have talked
about this a lot, but this really happened quickly. So
streaming now is forty five percent of viewing, and cable
is twenty four and broadcast is twenty which means cable
and broadcast combined is now lower than people streaming. And

(06:59):
the reason I say that's still a big deal. Is
only back as far as twenty twenty one, which is
not very long ago. Twenty twenty one is after COVID.
It's you know, a few years ago. At that point,
three two thirds of viewing was still done on broadcasting
or cable. About sixty five percent of viewing we're done

(07:21):
on those two and only twenty six percent, about a
quarter was done on streaming. So that is that shift
is happening really really quickly, and anybody who is in
the business of broadcast and cable distribution really has to

(07:42):
see that. I mean, the writing's been on the wall
for a long time, but this revolution is manifesting itself
really quickly.

Speaker 1 (07:49):
Yeah, it's pretty remarkable and about a minute or so.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
Well, not just youngsters, by the way, sixty five plus
are the biggest growth in streaming over the last year. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:58):
It takes us a little bit to figure out that out.
I mean, I know, it's just not as easy as
changing channels anymore. You got to get the other remote,
and then you got to go to your menu, and
you got to flip over to Netflix or whatever. And
it just takes us a couple of seconds to figure
all that out. Doctor Bob Thompson from Syracuse University. The
other story it was sad one this week was the
passing of Anne Burrell, the Food TV Network star, only

(08:19):
fifty five years old, and she was great on the
Food Network. And the Food Network's been around for I mean,
I remember watching it in the early nineties when they
actually it's it's much like MTV right when they actually
would tell you how to cook things. Now it's a
lot of competitions and really polished to produce shows.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yeah, it's exactly like that in a number of shows.
But yeah, this was a surprise, and she was one
of their one of their stars and kind of a
you know, one of the beloved people we think of
when we thought of Food Network and around here too.
It's she was born just down the street in Casanovia,
New York, and went to college in Buffalo, So she

(08:59):
was one of our upstate stars.

Speaker 1 (09:02):
Yeah, that's too bad. It's in the early days though,
with you know, Emerald Legassi and Bobby Flay and one
of my favorites was Alton Brown and you know, Rachel
Ray was an early one who's parlayed her success and yeah,
you know daytime TV stuff. But again that they actually
taught you how to cook things. And now it's you know,
more of these competition style the type shows.

Speaker 2 (09:24):
Yeah, no, I missed the old Food Network, just like
I missed the old MTV. And I remember when Bravo
was named referring to what you shout at the end
of an opera or a ballet. It's you know, high
art programming. It's amazing how these cable channels have evolved.
But for all of that, the Food Network still has

(09:47):
a lot of stuff that's food related anyway.

Speaker 1 (09:49):
Sure, yeah, nice still was

Speaker 2 (09:50):
Arts and entertainment is sometimes neither art nor entertainment