Mathguy64 said:
Yep. 50 years ago 11 year old Mathguy watched that in a theater and became terrified for life of getting in the water at the beach.
Ditto except I was 9 and subjected to it in about the worst possible way. I've told this story on here before but....
I lived in Seoul South Korea at the time as my dad was in the army. Movies came to us there on base about 6 months after they released in the US so we did not have it in summer of 1975 but in winter of early 1976. Winter in SK is very cold by the way.
There was so much anticipation of it as we had heard a lot about it by then, so of course it was a massive line. There was one theater with one screen so like 4 showings of it per day. No advance ticket sales either. We literally waited in line for 4+ hours in the freezing cold and barely got into the third showing that day. Which meant there were very few seats left. Being a Gen X kid I was left to fend for myself and sat alone a few rows behind my parents between some Korean women (there were civilians allowed on base, lots of families had maids for example).
Anyway the movie starts and these Korean ajummas (not a slur it means married middle aged woman roughly) were screaming hysterically. I was terrified and spent at least 30% of the movie on the floor ducking my head behind the seats and covering my ears. But I saw enough of it to be terrified of the water after that like all kids were.
then just a few months after seeing it my parents sent me to Boy Scout camp which was on the coast of Korea and the Yellow Sea which was infested with various sharks. That only added to my panic. The first day of camp they got us on the beach and explained the buddy system and we practiced. Then we went swimming. I never got deeper than mid thigh. And sure enough there was a shark sighting within 15 minutes and the warning sounded. I can't even describe the level of panic in that group of boys and the buddy system was a complete failure. It was every scout for himself and I got out in mere microseconds and was halfway up the beach before I dared to stop running. We never went back to the beach for that 2 weeks.
I made sure to pass along that feeling when we took my kids to S Padre for the first time and paid it back by watching Jaws the first night we were there.