Hey, it’s all in the marketing. They even showed it at the Cannes Film Festival, as mentioned in this thread.
Thank you. All my logic is remarkably simple! (There’s a quote for all my haters to lift.)
I don’t think we’ve said enough about TroutMan providing the definitive exegesis on Sharknado. And for Gangster Octopus chiming in. Heck with an academic article on Psychohistory. I’m penning TroutMan Vs. Gangster Octopus. Double the ratings!
This article gets to the heart of the matter better than anything I’ve read. In short: ironic mockery of “so bad it’s ‘good’” B-level movies has become so ubiquitous that it now literally makes business sense for studios to design intentionally bad movies based around outrageously absurd - but readily Twitter-friendly - conceits. What Ed Wood once did by accident, SyFy now does on purpose as an easy revenue stream.
OMG. So you honestly belief that this sums up what most people, even the people here find enjoyable about the movie?
I think you’re all making this more complicated than it is. The reason that “Sharknado” caught so much attention while the other movies mentioned in the OP did not is simple: The title.
I mean, you hear “Mansquito”, and you think cheap remake of “The Fly”.
You hear “Sharktopus”, and you think another monster variation.
You hear “Sharknado” and you go, “Wait, what? How can they combine a shark and a tornado?” It just grabs you and makes you think or wonder about it in ways that none of the other titles do.
Oh sure, there’s definitely that, but even as someone who generally can’t sit through a SyFy movie, I really enjoyed this. I had to reflect for a while to understand why and I’m not sure really understand - not completely certainly - but I’m pretty sure that a big part of it is the fact that it was artfully awful.
I’ve seen a couple of parody movies like a couple of the Scream parodies, Scary Movie. These had some funny scenes, but they weren’t artful. They were just cut and pastes of SNL skits basically. This was funny first because it was so obviously self mocking while often in the very same moment being dead pan serious, but also because it was so well nuanced. They didn’t beat you over the head with any of the allusions or references with a ‘wink, wink, point, did you see what I just did there?’
Now I don’t mean to say that it was fine art or anything by describing it that way but it clearly did demonstrate a level of trade craft and humor that you simply don’t see in the vast majority of bad movies - whether they’re that way intentionally or not.
To be honest, I preferredMega Python vs. Gatoroidbut Sharknado was enough of a hoot to make it worth watching on a summer night when everything else stunk.
Yup, I think the creators approached it with humor but without being over the top like the Scary Movies you mentioned. Check out an interview with the writer - they were having fun, not only employing some cold calculus on how to appeal to hipsters.
Writer: “Just a thought here, but can we have him chainsaw his way out of a shark?”
Producer: “How would he get into he shark?”
Writer: “Well he would leap into it.”
Producer; “OH yeah, we can do that, but should we? does it make sense?”
EVERYONE IN THE ROOM STARTS LAUGHING
Writer: “Oh my,” wipes away tear, “I’ll get right on that.”
Producer: “And have him pull that chick out of there too, the one that got swallowed mid-air.”
Writer: “Well of course, I pretty much figured that you’d want that already.”
Producer: “Just checking.”
There is this odd quirk in modern pop culture, for people it’s summed up by:
“A celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin
So you have Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian.
It seems something similar that happens with movies and such. So Sharknado and Snakes on a Plane get a huge amount of pop culture references, far out of proportion to the number of people who have actually seen them, etc.
It is inexplicable.
I can see Gangster Octopus as a SyFy movie.
That’s precisely why I’m going to watch it. What other reason is there?
I concede, it does sound a little more frightening than “Attack of Troutman”.
While I don’t think this was a major factor in the Sharknado buzz, the movie did get a little unintended publicity from the late Glee star Cory Monteith. He tweeted about it last week…just before he died. His last words to the public were “what the crap is Sharknado[?] oh. IT’S A SHARK TORNADO.”
That article about “look at those crazy movies for sale at Cannes” was reposted and quoted dozens of times, and even made its way onto “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” It was just a meme with some product behind it.
IOW, Sharknado is the Rebecca Sealfon of B-movies.
This seems like a huge marketing opportunity for Air Swimmer, the guys who make the remote controlled flying shark.
“Come here, Gaal” said the psychohistorian Hari “Raven” Seldon, pulling out his pocket calculator. “I start with the matrix for Popular Entertainments…” his fingers flew over the keys of the device, rendering the factors in glowing red numbers.
“Now I add the coefficient for sharks… and for tornados. And we process to find the result of combining these.”
Gaal Dornick’s eyes widened when he saw the result. “Why, that’s many times greater than the result for Abraham Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog!” he exclaimed.
“Many times,” agreed Seldon. “Can there be any doubt that, if anyone were to produce such an entertainment, many foolish people would be drawn into watching it? That is why I have decided to set up the Foundation, Dornick, and I want you to be part of it – to prevent things like these … “Sharknados”. Because can there be any dopubt that, knowing of these fantastic ratings, once the entertainment executives know about it, it will be produced? In fact, there wi;ll be entire series of such monstrosities, unless we work now to prevent it…”
Tricky. TroutMan would be seriously outgunned. I hear Gangster Octopus is heavily armed.
Remember that song “Friday”? And the whole Charlie Sheen thing? Same thing but with more sharks and tornadoes. The Internet makes dumb things fun but then everyone remembers they are dumb.