Jaws Poster Parodies

Submission 34,562

About

Jaws Poster Parodies are recreations of the iconic poster for the 1975 thriller film Jaws, featuring a giant shark attacking a lone woman in the ocean. Many of the parodies replace the shark or woman with different characters from a variety of contexts.

Origin

The film Jaws was released in the United States on June 20th, 1975. The movie poster (shown below, right) was based off artist Roger Kastel's paperback cover for the 1974 novel of the same name (shown below, left), which featured an image of a giant great white shark surging upwards through the water towards an oblivious swimming woman with the word Jaws printed above in red lettering (shown below).^[1]

The earliest known parody of the poster was on the cover of the January 1976 issue of the MAD Magazine, depicting a large shark attacking the magazine's mascot Alfred E. Neuman (shown below).

Spread

On August 3rd, 1978, the horror film Piranha^[10] was released, which featured a promotional poster with a large piranha attacking a woman floating at the surface (shown below, left). On October 2nd, 2003, Something Awful^[9] published an article titled "Nazi Jamboree," including an anti-Semitic version of the poster with the shark replaced with a Hasidic Jew (shown below, right).

On August 3rd, 2011, the Internet humor site Acid Cow^[3] published a compilation of notable Jaws parody images, followed by the Internet humor site Neatorama^[6] the following day. On February 29th, 2012, the site ShortList^[7] highlighted "16 alternative jaws posters." On June 20th, 2013, the pop culture blog Blurppy^[11] highlighted a mock promotional poster by artist Matt Ferguson for the 2013 science fiction film Pacific Rim in the style of the original Jaws poster (shown below, left). October 29th, Redditor seput submitted a Minecraft-themed parody poster titled "Squids!," featuring a squid creature attacking a player's avatar (shown below, right). Prior to being archived, the post gained over 1,300 votes (90% upvoted) and 70 comments on the /r/Minecraft^[5] subreddit. On January 20th, 2014, a page for "Jaws Attack" was created on TV Tropes^[8], which lists examples of various references to the film and poster in pop culture.