Four Years After ‘Jaws’ Gobbled Up the Box Office, It Devoured Small-Screen Competitors in Its Broadcast TV Premiere
“Tonight, after Mork, get ready for Jaws!”
That’s part of what famed announcer Ernie Anderson excitedly stated in a promo that aired on Sunday, Nov. 4, 1979, just ahead of the long-awaited broadcast television premiere of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster Jaws.
The movie was announced to be premiering on The ABC Sunday Night Movie at a special time (8:30pm, 7:30 Central and Mountain) and apparently, according to the promo, was airing right after Mork & Mindy (I recall that sitcom more from when it aired on Thursdays and don’t remember it moving to Sundays, but whatever!).
Screenshot: youtube.com/@KLXT77
Not that Jaws would have needed a hit show like Mork & Mindy as a lead-in to grab viewers, since the buzz around its premiere was so great, but it was just another added reason why ABC dominated that night (and the week as a whole).
Anderson’s legendary baritone was regularly heard as both announcer and hypeman for ABC series and movies throughout the ’70s and ’80s (following his stint as Cleveland horror movie host “Ghoulardi” during the ’60s), and it was his voice that introduced each installment of The ABC Sunday Night Movie. The man really understood the assignment and always went all out, often tailoring his delivery and voice level according to what he was promoting.
He did his usual fantastic job with this quick promo for the SNM debut of Jaws, delivering wonderfully dramatic lines like “It’s finally coming, the most powerful movie of all time …” in a way that might sound silly coming from someone else, but perfectly natural from him:
The hype got even more intense when it actually came time for the movie to air. The normal music for the SNM intro, always fun to listen to, was replaced in this instance with the iconic main Jaws theme by Oscar winner John Williams (the only other time I remember them doing that was when Raiders of the Lost Ark made its broadcast TV premiere on SNM, and its normal musical intro was replaced with another legendary Williams theme, the “Raiders March”).
Williams’ theme continues as Anderson begins his narration, dramatically amping up the audience even more than they already may have been with lines like “The most exciting movie ever made comes to television” and “the movie that made motion picture history.”
The first line is debatable, but the second one was not hyperbole; Jaws was the first U.S. film to gross over $100 million at the box office, launching the age of the summer blockbuster when it was released during what had until then largely been considered a slower time by Hollywood in terms of releasing high-profile movies, and it was the highest-grossing movie in U.S. history for a couple of years, until Star Wars came along).
The SNM intro also features scenes from the movie, including an unwitting Chrissie (Susan Backlinie) beckoning her passed-out date to “Come on in the water” and join her in an ill-advised night swim; Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) examining Chrissie’s remains and angrily determining that “This is not a boat accident!; quick snippets of the shark in scenes where it attacks the Orca and Hooper’s underwater cage, and, of course, Roy Scheider’s classic line: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
Anderson also introduces the three key actors: Scheider, Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw. Then, as the intro ends, the announcer — ominously and slowly, deepening his voice even more and building up some suspense — alerts viewers: “And now … get ready … for Jaws.”
I, like I’m sure many others, had been hyped for this airing of Jaws for a few months by the time it finally aired. A few months earlier, had watched ABC’s promotional special highlighting their upcoming fall programming. I liked tuning in to network specials like this every bit as much as reading the annual Fall Preview issue of TV Guide to determine what shows I might like to watch.
The networks would also hype feature films that were finally making their TV premieres on the respective channels. This was back in a day when it would often take a blockbuster like Jaws years to show up on television.
This was also an era where home video was just making its way into homes and was not widely prevalent. VCRs were cost-prohibitive for many at the time, and movies that were released on VHS or Beta tape were also priced to rent, not to own (from what I can tell, Jaws was first released on MCA Home Video in 1980, five years after it was in theaters). I remember looking through catalogs of movies on video in the early-to-mid-‘80s and seeing most of them costing up to like $99! Studios seemed to finally realize that many audiences would pay certain (lower) prices to own favorite titles sometime in the later ‘80s, as I remember. That really took off when the 1989 Batman movie made a very rapid (for the time) transition from the theater to VHS – about six months — and at an affordable cost (probably around $30 or so if I recall; still a good amount back then, but a lot more manageable than $99).
Remind Anyway, back to that ABC fall promo. When it came to the network’s hype of its upcoming movie premieres, I was very excited to learn that Jaws would be airing (I can’t remember if they said the date; if they did, I’m sure I had it circled in my calendar).
When Jaws hit theaters four-and-a-half years earlier, I had been 5 years old. I was very fascinated with reading about sharks in general, and got thrilled when I saw the classic movie poster image of the shark racing up toward the unsuspecting swimmer that had been added to the cover of paperback editions of Jaws that I saw one of my aunt’s friends reading one summer day beside my grandparents’ swimming pool.
I had heard about the movie, and knew my parents would not have taken me (well, my dad possibly would have; my mom, unlikely, though a few years later she would check Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws out from the library for me when I decided I wanted to read it after finally seeing the film in its TV debut).
So I had begged one of my uncles, who was about 14 at the time, to take me along when I heard he was going to see it. He, wisely for his age, told me the film was too scary for kids. I then asked another uncle, who was 16, if I could tag along on his trip to see the movie. He told me basically the same thing (but he was also taking a date to the movie, so I’m sure he primarily did not want a 5-year-old kid cramping his style).
There apparently had been a theatrical re-release of Jaws not long before its ABC premiere, which I don’t recall being aware of (it’s likely no one would have taken me to that screening, either).
screenshot: ebay/@storagetreasures2004
When I finally did see Jaws on the ABC Sunday Night Movie, I had to agree that it had been a good idea I did not see it when I was 5. It was intense enough watching when I was 9 and in what I’m sure was an edited format (I finally saw it uncut for the first time about eight years later, when it aired on HBO). But it was still enjoyable, and I also had fun talking about it with my classmates at school the next morning, one of the memories that helps enhance how special that airing remains in my recollection.
My friends and I certainly weren’t the only ones who had tuned in. The U.S. TV premiere of Jaws on Nov. 4, 1979, received a Nielsen rating of 39.1 and drew in 57 percent of the total audience, the second-highest televised movie audience behind the first TV telecast of Gone With the Wind on NBC in November 1976 (I vaguely remember watching that one when it came to TV, as well, though not as excitedly as I did Jaws).
A Nov. 7, 1979, article in The New York Times, with the headline “’Jaws’ Played to 80 Million on ABC,” explained that the movie was “easily last week’s biggest network program and the most watched telecast so far this season, surpassing the final game of the World Series.”
That final game of the World Series was a Game 7 between the Pittsburgh Pirates and Baltimore Orioles (the Pirates won the game and the Series, after overcoming a three games to one deficit). For Jaws to surpass viewership of a thrilling sporting event like that really says something.
The Times piece further states that Jaws had an estimated total audience of 80 million viewers and was seen in 29.7 million homes. The U.S. population at that time was roughly 222 million, so if the estimate of Jaws’ viewership is correct, it looks like about 36% of the country viewed that ABC Sunday Night Movie telecast! (My numbers may be off, math was never my strong suit; but it’s still a hell of a lot of people.)
The article finishes with noting how Jaws was the only dominant title among all the other broadcast specials and movies airing on TV during that all-important “sweeps” week; the other top-viewed broadcasts during that span on all three networks were regular weekly series. Jaws unsurprisingly put ABC over the top among its competitors that week.
Even less surprising was ABC’s decision to re-air Jaws sometime in 1980. That version, as seen in the videos below, had some deleted scenes that were edited back into the television broadcast (probably to pad out the time for the film from some of the violence that surely must have been cut out). I can’t remember watching that rebroadcast, but I do remember seeing some of these scenes in what I thought was the original 1979 broadcast, so perhaps they were in there, as well. I know I’ve seen them somewhere.
You can mostly understand why these scenes were left out of the theatrical version. They don’t do a whole lot to advance things (although in one instance we get a little more insight into Quint’s character), but they still are all part of the fun things that stick out in the overall memory of seeing Jaws for the first time on my family’s old Zenith furniture-style television set over 45 years ago.
Remind