Everyone makes jokes about things that are not in their bingo cards for the year, and for all of us, the bingo card did not have fast-food CEOs going on TikTok to take videos of themselves eating their “products.” Not their food, but their products.
It’s been a week of people mocking and generating memes about the McDonald’s CEO for deciding to make a promotional video for the new Golden Arch sandwich. He awkwardly was on social media taking what was considered by most as a pitifully small bite and being overwhelmed by what he thought was the size of the burger that had sesame seeds—something he was shocked at the inventiveness of.
The CEO in question is Chris Kempczinski, who has run McDonald’s since 2019. The promotional clip that circulated online quickly drew ridicule across TikTok and other platforms, with viewers pointing out how awkward the moment felt.
The bite itself became the focus of thousands of reactions, memes, and stitched videos, with people questioning whether the CEO actually eats the company’s food regularly. Instead of creating excitement around the sandwich, the clip seemed to spark a wave of parody content that spread across social media for days. But he loved those crispy onions..
A separate video of him eating a chicken sandwich has people joking that he was actually putting the napkin up to his mouth in order to spit it out.
After the video was widely mocked, Burger King, Wendy’s, and Taco Bell—and everyone else in between—went online to do similar videos but, because of the other response, took larger bites of the product. And that was the week. That was a week of social media, at least. People making mixes of the video, songs about the video, re-videoing the video, commenting on the video, all at the expense of the McDonald’s CEO.
Listen, anyone who follows conspiracy theories will know one of the most common conspiracy theories that has been active online recently is this thought—albeit gross—that fast-food joints don’t have enough cows to use in their products and are getting medical waste and other forms of ingredients that are less than edible.
It all seems silly and far-fetched until, of course, you see the CEO slam his teeth into a very small portion of a product that he won’t call food and promote that on social media.
Ridiculousness” has been canceled at MTV after 14 years and 46 seasons.
The comedy clip series, hosted by Rob Dyrdek, will continue into 2026 with previously shot first-run episodes, but no new episodes will be produced moving forward.
Season 46 will be the last installment of the series as reruns continue to air on MTV and select seasons stream on Paramount+..
Snd this could signal further evidence that MTV is also just about ending .. writing is on the wall..
In a cultural way it also may signal that the funny video era is also ending !! Ai fakery with chiropractors and faux Mr Rogers abound on social media.
He future is fake. Real videos are dead along with 56 seasons of Ridiculousness..
Have Halloween Decorations Gone Too Far? The New York Times Thinks So.
With just a few more days until Halloween at the time this post is being written, the signs of the season are everywhere. Streets are lined with orange lights. Skeletons lean against porch railings. Witches hang from gutters. Ghosts sway from the slightest breeze. Leaves fall like confetti over graves, pumpkins, and plastic bones.
The article points toward the new trend of hyper-realistic gore — bloody clowns, mangled “bodies,” dismembered limbs, and of course, the now-iconic 12-foot-tall Home Depot skeleton (which, let’s be honest, many of us tried to buy the moment it went on sale in July.)
From their opening:
On a recent Sunday evening, Melanie Parker took her 2-year-old to the Ditmas Park section of Brooklyn to see a house in the area known for its elaborate Halloween displays. “He loves classic Halloween imagery — pumpkins, witches, ghosts, spiders and skeletons,” Ms. Parker, 38, a full-time caregiver who lives with her partner in Crown Heights, said of her son.
Adorning the home, though, was “a ton of blood” as well as “dismembered bodies, like a child’s head,” she said. “They were all moving and speaking and gesturing and making noises.” The decorations were illuminated in a way that made many of the figures — and wounds — appear more lifelike, she added.
Since then, her son “keeps talking about the guy who broke his head and the people who were hurt. Our kid was both riveted and disturbed.”
Being a little spooked is part of the delight of Halloween. But lately, some say genuine jump scares are abundant — on stoops and front lawns, looming in doorways and hanging from rafters — as household decorations seem to have become more gory, more violent and unsettlingly realistic.
The piece quotes Tom Hardy, a finance professor at the University of Richmond, who notes that Halloween decorations have become far more realistic due to improved manufacturing and cheaper production. And the numbers back that up.
The National Retail Federation estimates that Americans will spend $4.2 billion on Halloween decorations this year — up from $1.6 billion just a few years ago in 2019.
That’s not a small shift but more like a cultural transformation.
Halloween Used to Be for Kids… Now It’s for Adults
Once upon a time, Halloween meant cardboard Frankenstein cutouts taped to doors, pillowcase trick-or-treating. Silly pranks. Sure eggs made people really mad, as did toilet paper.. Mischief that barely counted as mischief.
Now?
Trunk-or-Treat handles the kids on some random Thursday night..
Halloween night — and Halloween décor — now belongs to adults. With that adults have developed different tastes in how they celebrate..
Here are two images pushed by the TIMES piece to show how gruesome the holiday has come to look recently..
But before we clutch pearls too quickly, history reminds us something important: Let’s keep in mind, you can go back in history and realize that every era has thought the next one “went too far.”
We May Have Forgotten What Halloween Originally Was
When people today think “Halloween,” they think:
Michael Myers
Serial killers
Horror movies
Murder and gore
But Halloween didn’t start there.
In Pagan tradition — the roots of what became Halloween — this time of year was seen as the season of darkness. The sun was weakening. The world was cooling. The harvest was ending. Life was preparing for sleep.
The rituals weren’t created to celebrate darkness. They were created to ward it off.
Pagans lit fires to chase away spirits, wore masks to blend in and hide from the dead.. they left offerings at doorsteps for roaming souls.. and they carved jack-o-laterns to eventually scare of demons and Jack himself.
The point wasn’t to revel in horror but instead to acknowledge the darkness and survive it — until the light returned in winter festivals that later became Christmas.
So even if Halloween is darker now, gorier now, more theatrical now — the deepest roots of it actually weren’t about blood and brutality.
They were about respecting the season of death while waiting for rebirth.
So Have We Gone Too Far?
Eh.. maybe sometimes, right? We can see those types of decorations that do. We know it when we see it.. There’s a difference between celebrating spooky fun and staging a simulated fatal car accident on your lawn.
There’s a difference between a ghost in the window and a mangled corpse hanging from the gutters. Even the most dedicated ancient pagan, who believed the veil was thinning and spirits walked among us, probably would not have created a full-on gore display in their front yard.
The point was never shock value but instead it was remembrance and respect–and yes a little fear of what was unknown.
Maybe the Real Question Is This… is it for us or for the kids?
Are we decorating for fear or are we decorating for ritual? Something meaningful seems to have become lost in the shuffle of cheap decorations..
Are we trying to scare the neighborhood kids or are we unconsciously reenacting the oldest seasonal story humans ever told?
The world is dark.. so we face it with light.. Halloween is not about mayhem or murder .. and actually it never was about either of those things. It is a mirror on who we are–we are looking at ourselves in a mirror behind the gore and blood dripping from the reflection…
There have been so many times over the years that we’ve felt nostalgic when we see old Halloween decorations — you know, those cardboard cutouts that were orange and green. Frankenstein’s head taped onto the door. There was something practical about those decorations, but also simple. But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe we get that nostalgia not just because we remember the cardboard or the artwork, but because things today have gotten too gory, too over the top. Maybe we’ve become desensitized from how much gore and shock we’re immersed in, even in comedy.
You scroll online now and there are AI videos of chiropractors throwing old women out windows or jumping on people’s backs. The shock might make you laugh the first time, but at some point it just becomes tiring. Gore is the same way. Movies try to go for the big shock, the big moment — but they don’t really shock anymore. They just leave us bored. We’ve been so inundated with intensity that all we want now is the cardboard cutout of Frankenstein. It feels like that’s all we want.
The world gets dark. We face it. We wait for the light.
Halloween isn’t just murder and mayhem. It never was.
But it is a mirror — and maybe right now, we’re looking into a mirror that just happens to have a little more blood on it.
📣 When the White House Borrows from Halo: A Recruitment Gambit That’s Both Brilliant and Unnerving
So here’s a wild one for you. Imagine this: the powers that be in the White House, or at least whoever’s running their social media playbook , decide to roll out a recruitment campaign for ICE and Homeland Security. And what do they use to get people’s attention? An image straight out of Halo…the Flood, that creepy parasitic alien menace.
Now, let’s break this down a bit, because there’s a lot going on here. On one level, it’s actually a pretty clever piece of marketing if you think about who they’re targeting. They’re obviously aiming at a certain demographic.. people who grew up on Halo, who understand the reference, and who might feel a little secret thrill of recognition. It’s like a hidden message just for them: “Hey, you know what the Flood is? Then you get what we’re talking about.”
But on the flip side, and this is where it gets shaky, it’s also a little unnerving. They’re turning a fictional alien invasion that consumes everything in its path into a metaphor for real human beings. And let’s be honest, it’s not exactly a flattering metaphor. It kind of puts a militarized target on people, and that’s where it gets ethically murky.
It also tells you a lot about the Trump-era approach to media and marketing. They took what Obama did with social media back in 2008 and cranked it up to eleven. They know how to dominate the internet game and how to get attention.. good press, bad press, it all keeps them in the spotlight. And this is just another example of that: using a piece of pop culture that resonates with a certain group to send a message that only they’ll fully get.
In the end, it’s a fascinating, if kind of eyebrow-raising, tactic. It shows just how much of a double-edged sword this kind of marketing can be both effective and a little unsettling. And hey, maybe that’s the point. It’s 2025, and this is just another chapter in the ongoing saga of how politics and pop culture keep colliding in the wildest ways.
For those who saw the Charlie Kirk video this week, we probably still can’t get over it. It was gruesome and graphic—and honestly, it’s something we probably shouldn’t have seen at all.
A few days ago, when Charlie Kirk was assassinated at a college in Utah, everything seemed to go to hell in a handbasket. From that moment on, we’ve been fighting, doxing, outing.
But put all that aside for a second. One of the worst moments of this entire week was not just Kirk’s death, but also the horrifying video of a Ukrainian refugee being stabbed to death on a train. Two separate tragedies, two shocking images, both dropped into our social media feeds.
Back in the old days, you had to hit “play” before you saw something like that. You had to make a choice—yes or no. Sometimes platforms still blur or black out videos now, but for at least 9 to 12 hours after Kirk’s assassination, the footage wasn’t hidden. It auto-played. It popped up without warning. And for those who saw it—including me, against my own will the second time—it was haunting. The first time I clicked intentionally. The second time it was forced on me.
What we all saw was someone’s life being ripped away in an instant. I’m not trying to get graphic or indulge in gore porn, but it felt like watching a soul leave the body in real-time. Blood pouring, life slipping.
The Drudge Report even used an image of Kirk slumped lifeless as its main photo for 24 hours, linked directly to the video. We can debate whether people had the “right” to see it, but even if we do—maybe we shouldn’t have. It’s not something the human psyche is built to take in casually while scrolling before bed.
And sure enough, the fallout has been real. People online have said they couldn’t sleep for days. Others described feeling sick to their stomachs. All because of a video they didn’t ask to see.
In the past, disturbing content was something you sought out. Kids traded VHS copies of Faces of Death. Early internet users braved Rotten.com. That was back when the “dark web” was just the web. But the Charlie Kirk video? This was a dark-web moment happening on the mainstream internet. And maybe that’s what feels so different about it.
We’re not saying this is an Archduke Ferdinand moment, but the assassination feels different because of how it was delivered. We saw it. Together. In real time. On the same platforms where we share our kids’ pictures, joke with friends, and post memes. The very place that connects us also traumatized us.
I don’t know where we go from here. I’m not calling for bans or laws. I’m not demanding that social media change its rules overnight. What I’m saying is simpler, more gut-level: we weren’t supposed to see that video. Those of us who did probably won’t forget it. And that’s not good for our minds, our hearts, or our national consciousness.
But here’s the thing, that’s not why I don’t like the logo. I don’t even care to pick a political side. I’m just sick of businesses stripping out every last speck of personality and replacing it with a soulless minimalist brand, like someone took the heart out of the place.
Remember Ruby Tuesday? Loud atmosphere, onion-straw burgers, sugary margaritas, neon décor, music blasting? … chaotic, over-the-top—just fun. Remember McDonald’s with playgrounds and colorful walls, where kids ran around and old folks lounged with their coffee? Today it’s all grey, sterile, silent… more like a dentist office than a place to eat.
This trend isn’t limited to restaurants. Inside our own homes, open-concept kitchens, grey walls, zero character are suddenly “in.” Bring back the wood paneling. Bring back the burgundy. Bring back some damn charm.
As for Cracker Barrel—well, time will tell. Their stock is down. People are picking a side now: eat there or boycott it. But think about it—nobody ever called Cracker Barrel fine dining. It wasn’t about that. It was about the experience—the front country store, the peg game at every table, the sense of stepping into something nostalgic.
Now, with the logo gone and the interiors “modernized,” that experience is fading. The soul is slipping away, and what’s left is just another bland, forgettable brand.
Now the real question is, what does Mr. Mike from Cracker Barrel actually think?
Cue the morning bell. Cue the fluorescent lights. Cue the shadows.
Starting this month (maybe even now depending on when you read this), across the United States, something unprecedented will happen.
A generation of children — born during one of the strangest chapters in modern history — will walk into kindergarten classrooms for the first time. They were conceived in isolation, delivered in silence, and swaddled in uncertainty. They are the COVID kids. The lockdown babies. The pandemic generation.
They don’t remember the trauma. But they were raised by it.
And now, teachers, already battle-tested by Gen Z, numbed by Gen Alpha, and drained by a thousand daily bureaucratic fires, are bracing for the unveiling.
When the bell rings and those little shadows begin filling the halls under the flicker of cold fluorescent light, no one really knows what to expect. These kids weren’t just born into a pandemic. They were shaped by it.
Some early studies suggested they’d have communication delays. Some TikTok teachers swear they’re smarter. Others say they’re quieter, more well-behaved. But the truth is no one really knows. There hasn’t been enough research. There hasn’t been enough time.
These kids were born into a world that kept its face covered..literally. Their first years were filled with masked expressions, muffled words, and Zoom screens. Their parents were anxious, unemployed, essential, depressed, distracted .. or all of the above. Some of these children were born into warm homes with love, attention, and time. Others were born into chaos. Into neglect. Into trauma.
And trauma doesn’t disappear just because a child doesn’t remember it. Trauma seeps. It lingers in rooms. It shapes the way caregivers speak, hold, feed, and raise. The lockdown generation didn’t just inherit a new world. They were forged in its uncertainty.
They don’t need to be taught how to use technology, they were practically born with a Wi-Fi signal in the womb. They swipe before they speak. They know how to pause YouTube before they know how to tie their shoes. They understand digital language innately, but will they understand each other?
This isn’t about fear mongering, it’s about the unknown.
What does a generation raised by people in crisis look like once they enter society en masse?
What happens when 3.5 million tiny humans, the first full wave of post-pandemic babies, walk into kindergarten rooms for the first time, and teachers look at them not knowing what to expect?
The millennials grew up cynical. Gen Z grew up online. Gen Alpha is growing up desensitized.
And now comes the lockdown generation — born in fear, raised in masks, and possibly… surprisingly brilliant. Or broken. Or both.
And like any good horror story, the scariest part isn’t the monster you can see.
It’s the one quietly sitting in the circle rug, glue stick in hand, looking up at you with wide eyes… while you wonder what kind of world shaped them before they could ever speak back.
I spoke to a teacher just last week — someone who’s been in the game for 25 years. She’s seen it all: the compliant kids, the curious ones, the class clowns, the kids with chaos in their eyes. She told me she’s nervous. Not because she’s burned out (though honestly, who wouldn’t be by now?), but because she’s watching something shift.
She said she’s seen three wildly different generations move through her classroom. But Generation Alpha, she claims, is the most distracted and — in her words — the “least controllable.” Now, sure, maybe that’s a teacher who’s seen one too many snack wrappers smuggled into Chromebooks. But I trust her. She’s not dramatic. She’s grounded. And if she’s saying she’s worried about this next wave.. this lockdown generation ..then I think it’s worth paying attention.
Will these kids even be into sports? Or will that feel too slow for their dopamine-fueled brains? They’ve already had screens in their faces since birth. They’ve been swimming in pop culture longer than they’ve been walking. They’ve likely absorbed a ton of information, too .. let’s not forget, during the lockdowns, a lot of well-meaning parents panic-purchased every educational app in existence trying to make up for closed preschools. Maybe these kids are actually going to blow us away with their knowledge, their vocabularies, their ability to navigate tech like tiny coders in Velcro sneakers.
But there’s something weird happening culturally.
See, kids have always lived in the moment, that’s nothing new. But this generation? They seem to have no reference point for what came before. There’s no nostalgia pipeline. No reruns. No channel surfing through time. When we were kids, you’d turn on the TV and accidentally land on a show from 20 years ago. Boom! An instant education in the past. But now? Streaming is a filter bubble. The oldest thing some of these kids have seen is The Office… and even Friends practically ancient lore to them.
Millennials grew up with Full House, Happy Days, and The Wonder Years reruns.. shows that gave us a sense of history, even if it was sugarcoated. Generation X grew up under the weight of the past, with the ghost of Vietnam in every TV drama and punk album. But these kids? They don’t know what came before… and more importantly, no one is showing them.
If someone made The Wonder Years today, it would be set in 2005. Wrap your head around that. The Iraq War. The dawn of Facebook. The tail end of MySpace. The strange, hazy period right after 9/11 when everything was weird, tense, and deeply uncertain. Honestly, maybe someone should make that version of The Wonder Years. Because kids today have no idea what that era felt like and no clear path to understanding it.
So here we are. August. The calm before the academic storm. Teachers are polishing up their lesson plans, Wi-Fi routers are warming up like engines, and smartboards are flickering to life. And soon, 3.5 million children born in the isolation of a global crisis will fill classrooms across America.
Will they be resilient? Will they be fragile? Will they be brilliant? Broken? Beautiful?
Or something altogether new?
The truth is, no one knows. Not the teachers. Not the psychologists. Not the parents. Not even the kids themselves. Because this generation wasn’t shaped by the world, it was shaped by the pause in the world. And whatever was born in that silence… is about to speak.
President Trump is no stranger to posting wild content on social media.. but his latest post from Saturday has people scratching their heads .. see
Trump shared a satirical throwback to the infamous O.J. Simpson slow-speed chase. Only this time, instead of O.J. in the white Bronco, it’s President Obama being pursued… by Trump himself. And in the adjacent police car? None other than Vice President JD Vance.
Well—sort of.
See, it wasn’t actually the JD Vance. It was one of those bizarre “Rare Vance” images that have been floating around the internet ever since Trump met with Zelensky. You know the ones: AI-looking, almost-human, definitely unsettling.
So now the big question: Did Trump know he was posting a Rare Vance? Was he in on the joke, trolling the internet with meme magic? Or did he just think, “Hey, that’s a pretty good pic of JD!”
Either way, we’re left wondering if the President just inadvertently mocked his own VP, or if he’s three layers deep into some kind of 5D meme chess.
As always, inquiring minds want to know. And Rare Vance? He’s just along for the ride.
There’s a video that’s not just going viral it’s going supernova. Over the past 48 hours, the video titled “Cason Sees Jesus” has exploded across social media. And if you’ve watched it, you know why.
Let’s unpack this for a moment.
From what we can gather, this is a deeply personal video. It appears to be filmed by a friend of a mother whose young son — Cason — had some kind of skateboarding accident and ended up in the hospital.
The details are fuzzy: we don’t know the exact nature of the injury, or what type of surgery he underwent, if any. What we do see is a boy coming out of anesthesia, surrounded by his mother, several nurses, and a few others who remain off-camera.
What happens next is where belief and skepticism collide.
Cason, clearly not fully conscious or grounded in the room, begins to describe something — or somewhere — that seems profoundly spiritual. He’s weeping. His voice is shaky. And he’s talking about seeing Jesus.
He tells his mother how beautiful Jesus is.
He then says he sees his dad — and you can hear his mother in the background gently confirming that Cason’s father passed away about a year ago. He also sees his “Papa” — presumably a grandfather — and calls him strong. He pleads for a hug. And in an especially haunting moment, he says he misses his mom… while she is right there beside him.
That part hits differently.
Throughout the nine-minute video, Cason is visibly emotional. And as it turns out, so are millions of people who’ve watched it. Comments across YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Reddit are filled with crying emojis, prayers, and personal stories. Some say they’re shaken. Some say they’re comforted. Others say it brought them back to their own spiritual beliefs — or challenged them.
Now, let’s take a step back. Yes, Cason is under anesthesia. And we’ve all seen the funny videos — the ones where people come out of surgery babbling about cheeseburgers or proposing to nurses. That may have even been the original intention behind filming Cason. Maybe they were hoping for a goofy moment. But what they captured instead… feels very different.
This wasn’t just a brief, silly ramble. Cason’s words had structure. His emotions were heavy. His vision, if you want to call it that, was sustained. And it seemed to come from a place of deep knowing.
Here’s where things get murky and also, personal.
Was this a genuine spiritual experience? Or was it the result of a young brain floating between consciousness and confusion, grasping for meaning in a fog of anesthesia?
Some nurses in the room can be heard trying to comfort the family, saying things like, “this is normal.” But many commenters online weren’t having that.. some were even upset, interpreting the responses as dismissive or awkward. But in fairness, it may have just been nervous laughter. When something unexplainable happens, people react however they can.
We don’t know much else about Cason. We don’t know what happened after the video cut off. And we don’t know what he remembers now that he’s fully awake. We do know that the video was uploaded by someone who shares a lot of faith-based content, which led some skeptics to suggest the experience may be shaped by religious upbringing. And sure, there’s some truth to that idea — that we draw on familiar spiritual symbols in altered states.
But does that make the experience any less powerful? Any less real?
I’ve only been under anesthesia once myself. And when I came out of it, apparently I launched into a rant about someone’s cooking. (True story: I said all she cooks with is teriyaki.) Why that memory? Why that topic? Who knows — I certainly wasn’t in control of it. So I get the weirdness of post-surgical talk. But Cason’s experience went beyond a passing comment. It had continuity. Emotion. Gravity.
And maybe that’s what’s staying with people most is the weight of it.
In the end, we don’t know what happened. We don’t know what Cason saw or if he saw anything at all. But what we do know is that millions of us witnessed a moment that felt like more than just a medical recovery. It felt like a message, a mystery, or maybe just a mirror, reflecting our own hopes and questions about life after this one.
Will we get updates? We hope so.
Do we deserve them? Maybe not.
But once something this powerful enters the online ether, it lingers. It plants seeds. And it makes us wonder.
For now, we hope Cason is okay. And if he truly saw what he says he saw… we hope it brought him peace. Because it sure stirred something in the rest of us.
When a movie makes it big, it’s is half because of the movie.. the other half is due to the culture it is tapping into.
Fifty years ago today, on June 19, 1975, a movie premiered that didn’t just dominate the box office — it redefined it. Jaws wasn’t just a film. It was a cultural eruption. A tectonic shift in how movies were made, marketed, and remembered. And it didn’t just scare people in theaters. It made them afraid to put their legs in the water.
I wasn’t alive in 1975. Everything I know about that era comes from siblings, old newspaper clippings, and stories my late parents used to tell. But Jaws still reached me. Its shadow has loomed over every summer since. And maybe that’s the most powerful legacy of all: a movie so deeply embedded in the American psyche that it still haunts the waves five decades later.
Kids then were playing in playgrounds with metal slides and staying out until the street lights came on.. but fear was lurking in places that people never noticed until then..
The Perfect Cultural Storm…
1975 was a strange, tense time in America. The Vietnam War had just ended. Nixon had resigned in disgrace. Inflation was high, and faith in leadership was lower than ever. There was a national malaise settling in. Distrust of institutions. Paranoia. A sense that the world was changing too fast and too violently to understand.
Then came Spielberg.
At just 27, Steven Spielberg tapped into all of that anxiety — not overtly, but instinctively. Jaws was a movie about a shark, sure. But it was also a movie about a mayor more concerned about tourism dollars than public safety. About institutions failing. About fear hiding just beneath the surface.
And he didn’t need blood and gore to do it. The shark barely appears in the first half of the film. It was mechanical. Broken, half the time. But Spielberg turned that weakness into strength: he let our imaginations do the work. The tension simmered in the absence. The dread grew in the silence. And then there was the score.
The Score That Changed Everything
John Williams gave us a soundtrack of suspense that has never been topped. Two notes. That’s all it took. Dunna… Dunna…
It sounds simple. It was simple. But it was primal. It mimicked a heartbeat, a countdown, a presence just behind you. That score didn’t just accompany Jaws — it was the shark. It was the fear.
And it didn’t stay contained to the screen. It spilled out into the real world. Newspaper articles from the time talked about people who were afraid to go to the beach. Even lakes. Attendance at some coastal resorts dropped. All because a film made the unseen feel more terrifying than anything visible.
(Click the photo to see full size)
From Classic Monsters to Real Monsters
Before Jaws, monsters were myths. Frankenstein. Dracula. Godzilla. Fantastical creatures. Jaws made the monster real. Great white sharks exist. We just hadn’t thought to fear them yet. Spielberg didn’t invent the idea of terror — he just relocated it to the familiar.
He took the safe, sunny world of suburban beach trips and laced it with danger. He gave the ocean teeth. And that idea rippled out far beyond Jaws itself. You can see it in Nightmare on Elm Street Part 4, where Freddy’s claw circles in ocean waves — an unmistakable nod to the shark.
Even Saturday Night Live created a sketch character based on the Jaws concept: a shark pretending to be a door-to-door mailman.
Can It Happen Again?
This is the question I keep coming back to.
Yes, we’ve had massive summer blockbusters since: Jurassic Park, The Dark Knight, Avengers: Endgame. But nothing has ever truly matched the shockwave of Jaws. Nothing changed the entire film industry overnight quite like it.
Why not?
Because we live in a different world now. We’re saturated with media. Spoiled by CGI. We know too much. Trailers give away plot twists. Behind-the-scenes features run before a movie even premieres. The mystery is gone.
So it will most likely never ever happen again. At least not like it did in ’75..
In 1975, a movie could still sneak up on you. Jaws did more than that — it sunk its teeth into a nation’s soul and never let go.
Spielberg would go on to do it again with E.T., with Poltergeist, and with Close Encounters. He has a gift for capturing the temperature of society in a given moment. But Jaws was the first. And maybe the most lasting.
So here’s to 50 years of fearing the ocean. Here’s to two simple notes that made us question whether we really wanted to dangle our feet in the water. Here’s to the monster that was all too real — and the genius who knew exactly when to unleash it.
Happy anniversary, Jaws. The beach was never the same.
