Selachimorpha.
That’s a name I had never heard or seen until I looked it up a few minutes ago, but it describes an animal species made famous in the 1970s by filmmaker Stephen Spielberg.
An animal, in fact, that almost seems to be overwhelming our culture now.
Sharks.
I was 25 when “Jaws” came out in 1975 and essentially changed the culture. It was the movie that created the idea of the summer blockbuster, a movie people would see again and again during summer vacation. It was a new type of movie with a new type of expectation.
Movies like this were expected to gross more than $100 million, even at 1975 prices.
It certainly isn’t a coincidence that many of the finest American movies of the last half century were made in the first half of the 1970s — before “Jaws.”
It was “Jaws” that unleashed Sequelmania, and it was only a little bit funny when 14 years later, Robert Zemeckis suggested a nearly never-ending series of “Jaws” movies in “Back to the Future 2.”
But long after “Jaws” movies petered out, shark movies and shows of all sorts became popular. In 1988, the Discovery Channel started “Shark Week,” which has become a really big deal.
And in the last few years, all sorts of movies have been getting weirder and weirder. Consider the Sharknado movies, where sharks are horrific forces of nature, and of course all the other movies where the sharks have become so big they make Spielberg’s great white look like a guppy.
Forget “Schindler’s List.”
Forget “Saving Private Ryan” and all the others.
Thanks a lot, Stephen, for giving us all those sharks.