It was obviously just a matter of time before action figures depicting the characters from Jaws came out, but one does have to wonder, much like Jeremy Dick of MovieWeb, why Richard Dreyfuss’ character Matt Hooper was left out. Thus far Quint and Brody have been released as 8-inch figures with various accessories such as a chum bucket, binoculars, and other items, but Bruce the shark and Hooper have been curiously left out. Funko Pop! has released characters of each one of them, including the moment when Bruce the shark was devouring Quint. Charming isn’t it? One can buy this and continuously gaze at one of the more disturbing moments from Jaws for as long as they want. Now they can even get the lifelike images of two of the characters to set on their desk, shelf, or wherever they like. One thing about these figures though, much like any other collectible, is that they’re not exactly made to played with as a child would play with any other doll or action figure since it’s likely that they’re not cheap and they’re not easy to replace. It’s kind of amusing really that adults do spend money on these kind of things but it’s not as uncommon as anyone would think since for one reason or another the novelty of it is kind of nice for those that love pop culture this much and want a piece of it.
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Jaws is undeniably a part of pop culture that is fairly universal since even if a person hasn’t watched the movie they’ll have heard of it at one point or another in their life. Despite the cliche it’s the movie that made people afraid to go into the water again, no matter where that body of water happened to be. Unfortunately for the movie the sequels didn’t really spark as much of an interest as the original, and there’s a good reason why. For starters, the shark in the first movie was killed, which would mean that anything after that indicates that there might have been some mad shark disease going around that only affected one in however many sharks were patrolling the New England coastline. That would be one of the only explanations for a Jaws sequel, let alone three sequels. Another reason why the sequels weren’t that great is the fact that they were trying to capitalize on something that had already been done, which is insanely hard as any filmmaker could tell you since the first movie has to be topped in a big way for a sequel to be accepted.
Obviously this never happened with the Jaws movies as the second to the fourth really didn’t do much, and the effort of making the shark actually ‘roar’ like some mythical sea beast only made it even more comical. The first movie was gritty, downright dirty, and wasn’t really meant to be laughed at since it was supposed to be a life and death struggle between man and shark. The sequels, well, they became kind of a running joke thanks to the fact that not only was Bruce the shark killed in the first one, but because the story just kind of capsized and started to sink the moment that a sequel was even mentioned. To be fair the comical nature of the sequels, despite not being the aim, was kind of interesting since people have had a good laugh at the expense of these movies for a while and a good number of jokes have come from the Jaws sequels, and while the original has been included in them it’s still managed to keep the same level of respect that it earned as it’s the one that started everything off and because it did something back in that day that hadn’t been seen yet. As of now some people still prefer Bruce to the CGI sharks that are so plentiful in the movies today, if only because it added a little more realism to the whole process. Those of us that have had the pleasure of being able to visit Universal Studios in the past could likely attest to how much fun it is to see the mechanical shark up close and personal.
At this point it’s enough to wonder if the manufacturer responsible for putting out Quint and Brody will be thinking about putting out a version of Hooper and even Bruce the shark, as it would complete a set to be fair and might even net a bit more of a profit. Whether or not they would think about creating a scale model of the Orca, Quint’s boat, is kind of hard to say since it wouldn’t be cheap by any means, especially if attention to detail was given and it was large enough to house all three men. It’d be fun to see though. Emmet Meara of Bangor Daily News has a bit of information on what happened to the Orca after filming.
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