🌼Are You Going to Scarborough Fair?🏵
Do you remember where you were when the water turned mean?
Not metaphorically—though, yes, the '70s were an ocean of war residue, polyester heartbreak, and bell-bottom psychology—but literally. When that great white fin sliced across your CRT-screen soul in JAWS, baby, it wasn’t just summer that got wrecked. It was the last few droplets of innocence left after Woodstock mud and Nixon’s slow fade to static.
JAWS premiered in the summer of 1975, a time when Fonzie was still jumping jukeboxes and everyone’s mom had a crystal ashtray the size of a Crock-Pot. And when that Spielberg kid unspooled a sun-drenched shark apocalypse in surround sound (or mono, depending on your theater), America chomped.
And oh, the biting.
You remember. Your cousin Craig bit a Twinkie sideways that day and called it “shark trauma.” Biting became the new language of terror. Rice Krispy Treats with molar craters. Watermelon wedges carved like crime scenes. Even Barbie’s little feet got nibbled in the backyard sandbox while Disco Inferno scorched the airwaves.
🕺 The ‘70s weren’t just groovy. They were gnarly. Kids who grew up with JAWS learned to fear bathtubs, rain puddles, and municipal fountains. Swimming pools? Forget it. That blue plastic inflatable thing in your aunt’s yard suddenly felt…too quiet.
And let’s talk about the real fear: grown-ups. Divorce papers in macramé folders. Dads in tube socks with trauma mustaches. Moms flicking Virginia Slims while trying to teach themselves self-actualization from Cosmopolitan columns. The nation was still collectively cringing from Watergate, but JAWS? It gave us something to scream about together. Loudly. In Dolby.
Insert your memory here:
☀️ Did you see it at a drive-in with six kids in the back of a brown station wagon that smelled like Scotch Tape and hot dog buns?
☀️ Did someone in your family say “this isn’t scary” and then drop their Coke when Ben Gardner’s head popped out of that hole in the hull?
☀️ Or were you like me, secretly hoping the shark would eat the mayor first because of that suit?
The magic of JAWS wasn’t just the teeth or the tension—it was the timing. America needed a monster. We were maxed out on assassinations, breakups, and TV dinners. And Spielberg handed us a beast from beneath, practically gift-wrapped in John Williams' thumping dread-o-matic theme.
Meanwhile, over in pop culture:
✨ Soul Train was teaching you how to strut properly.
✨ Bell bottoms were dragging through shag carpet across the nation.
✨ KISS was on lunchboxes.
✨ Everyone had a cousin who claimed to know someone who went to the beach and "never came back."
And then…Squeaky aimed a gun at President Ford and missed by a hair's breadth, and suddenly, people started to talk about things. About trauma. About fairness. About why the dad in JAWS couldn’t hug his kids unless he was liquored up and knee-deep in bureaucracy.
We learned to laugh at the fear. Kind of. We turned it into inside jokes, family legends, and reruns. The shark got animatronic. We got nostalgic.
So this summer, in your living room, on your laptop, or projected onto the side of your dad's garage—watch JAWS again. Not for the gore. Not for the jump scares. But for the bite marks in your memory.
🦈 What did you bite that summer?
🦈 Who did you drag into the water with you, laughing and screaming?
🦈 What was your shark called? (Don’t say Bruce. Only Spielberg gets to say Bruce.)
Put on some Bee Gees, grab a Mr. Pibb, and cue up the film that taught us all to fear the deep, the dark, and the strangely polite menace of a dorsal fin cutting through calm water.
Because JAWS didn’t just change movies.
It rewrote summer.
🎥🩱🦈✨
