Where in the world is Sharky Sandiego? Probabably off in some far-flung location. These Shark Week titles all seem like they could be the next Sharknado. If you thought Sunday’s fake documentary Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives was exploitative, Syfy has something to sell you. Great whites are so awesome that it’s only a matter of time until Shark Week is hosted by the hair band Great White, and Bob and Doug McKenzie’s “Take Off” becomes its theme song.
#MYTHBUSTERS JAWS SPECIAL MOVIE#
The Hollywood blockbuster was built on the back of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 movie Jaws, so why not Shark Week? Is there a single person in the world who’d enjoy being adrift for 47 days with sharks all around? Nope, but fear makes for good TV. Way back in 1988, Discovery Channel’s founder John Hendricks said, “What we’ve learned is, if an animal can eat you, ratings go through the roof.” In other words: Sharks have teeth and they want to bite you. Of the 139 Shark Week programs we found, well over half use the word shark right in the title (some more bluntly than others), and seem titled to proclaim to shark fetishists that this is where to go for their purest sharkcentric experience. Wasn’t there a special about shark-jumping last year? And the year before that? And the five years before that? Curious about how often Discovery recycles its signature motifs, we sifted through 26 years of the network’s predatory programming and determined that every Shark Week is constructed out of eight basic building blocks. Like the sau-sagemaking process, I will leave the details to somebody else's imagination.As we find ourselves standing knee-deep in Shark Week–infested water yet again (knee-deep in water, you say? Well, Misterjaw says, “Yea-gotcha!”), Vulture can’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu. So when it comes to watching one take a chunk out of Ritter, I think I will pass. I have no illusions about what one of those animals can do to a human. I have watched bull sharks bite 150-pound tarpon in half. If you are unlucky and the shark hits an artery, you bleed to death in minutes. When you read about a bull shark attack _ we have had two serious attacks in Florida this year _ it is usually just that, an attack.Ī 350-pound bull shark, such as the one that ripped apart Ritter's leg, can and will kill you.Īn encounter with a bull shark results in, if you are lucky, the loss of a limb. Most dangerous sharks have a favorite prey. If the bite is just a nip, a bold surfer simply applies some duct tape, climbs back on his board and paddles back out.
#MYTHBUSTERS JAWS SPECIAL FREE#
If the wound is serious, the surfer heads to the emergency room, where he gets a dozen stitches that leave a "smiley face/frown scar" guaranteed to be worth a free beer at any beachfront bar for the rest of his life. The surfer feels a tug, sees blood in the water and paddles in. But when the shark realizes it has grabbed a leg instead of the desired mullet, it lets go. The surfers have to paddle through the buffet line to get to the breaking waves.Ī white palm slicing through the water looks a lot like the flash of a baitfish. Sharks aren't stupid, so they swim along the beach between the sandbars looking for an easy meal. Here's how it works:Ī hurricane swirls in the Atlantic and kicks up waves, which push the baitfish between the first and second sandbars common to many of Florida's beaches. Adam and Jamie built a bite force tester, but could not get any sharks to bite on it. Various claims about the strength of a shark’s bite. In most cases the unlucky individual is a surfer. Jamie’s first time in a shark cage, testing the myth that it could be damaged or destroyed if a shark hit it at high enough speed. The majority of those incidents occur on the east coast. We average 20 man-vs.-shark encounters a year.
The DVD also examines how different species of sharks feed, and it attempts to explain the difference between a "shark bite" and a "shark attack."įlorida leads the nation in shark attacks.
Ritter survived to review the films, and in the documentary he recounts details of the experience for the first time. The attack was filmed by cameras above and below the water. On April 9, 2002, Ritter was working in the Bahamas when a 350-pound bull shark bit him in the leg. According to an accompanying news release, the film (one of the highest-rated Shark Week programs in history) chronicles the exploits of shark behavioral-scientist Dr.
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