Last week, the world was treated to the cinematic classic in the making Sharknado 2: The Second One; which oddly enough is a sequel to last summer’s Twitter crashing craze Sharknado.

The sharkcentric movies from the Syfy network center around mankind’s response to a weather event that allows powerful offshore storms to pick up sharks from the ocean and carry them hundreds of miles away to rain down havoc on densely populated areas.

In Sharknado, the sharks were Pacific Ocean based and attacked Los Angeles, much to the dismay of Tara Reid and Ian Ziering. For the sequel, the sharks were in a New York state of mind after being plucked from the Atlantic Ocean allowing Tara Reid and Ian Ziering to be dismayed from sea to shining sea.

While few can argue that a story about sharks falling from the sky and wreaking havoc on New York City has the cinematic bite of say Citizen Kane, there are times when a movie, where everyone is in on the joke, can just provide pure guilty cinematic pleasure without the need to over analyze the meaning of Rosebud.

Years ago, a movie critic who worked for the newspaper I ran described this type of guilty cinematic pleasure as, “popcorn cinema for the Johnny lunch pail crowd.”

While this particular critic was raised on art house cinema and preferred an independent film to a summer blockbuster, he agreed that sometimes a movie just needs to be downright fun with a crazy plot and over the top acting.

I lost touch with him years ago. However, I want to believe that even my old film critic got caught up in the Sharknado feeding frenzy.

There were certainly many popcorn cinema moments, and unexpected cameos, in the sharks take a bite out of the Big Apple movie but what struck me most during the film was how the poor New York Mets just can’t seem to get a break as their Ballpark fell victim to the falling sharks.

Someone really should have checked to see if the New York Yankees were behind the taunting of their cross town rival.

Aside from learning that the House that Ruth Built, Yankee Stadium, appears to be immune from shark attacks, another lesson that I learned from the film is that a chain saw is a good item to have when one needs to cut open a shark. That knowledge definitely could have helped me a few years back when I tried to extract a jaw from a deceased shark I found on the beach.

Chompers, as the shark was known, was about a foot or two long when I found him. While most people might see a dead shark on the beach and think, “eww, dead shark,” I saw things a little differently. To me, the dead shark on the beach meant the chance to have a really cool shark jaw to display on my desk at work.

I can blame my aunt for this thought process. Many years earlier she and I stumbled upon a large shark that had washed up on the shore of Jacksonville Beach in Florida. We had been searching for shark teeth all morning and lo and behold here in front of us was a mouth full of pristine shark teeth ready for the picking.

Upon seeing the shark my aunt mentioned how much she wished she had brought a pair of pliers to pull the teeth out. Without any pliers we left the shark alone and continued our search for easier to grab shark teeth along the shore.

Decades later as I stared at Chompers, the words of my aunt came to me once more and I thought I can do better than a pair of pliers, I can take the whole shark home and extract the jaw teeth and all.

Of course, living in an apartment at the time, I did not really think that my neighbors would appreciate me sitting on the patio with a shark carcass so I took Chompers to my parents’ house.

Over the next week or so, I tried various methods to extract the jaw but had little luck and only managed to attract flies as the tiny teeth fell out of the very much still inside the shark jaw.

In the end, Chompers was given a proper burial in the front yard, and I was given a shark jaw my parents found at a store the next time they went to Hawaii.

A third life lesson I learned from Sharknado is that the scientific community, or at least the one that posts on the internet, seem very divided over the actual chances of a real Sharknado occurring. I was amazed at the number of articles that stated that a Sharknado event could really occur.

To be perfectly clear, a Sharknado, such as the one depicted in the movie, cannot really happen. For starters, even if there was somehow enough force in a tornado to pick up a bunch of unsuspecting sharks who happened to be swimming by at that exact moment they would die shortly after being thrust in the air since, spoiler alert, sharks are fish and can’t breathe out of the water.

While a Sharknado is basically ruled out by the laws of physics, I did actually witness a Catfishnado once in Florida when a school of catfish was picked up in a storm and deposited on my parents’ lawn.

So, the science of storms being able to pluck things out of the water is valid. But, to repeat again there is no scenario where hundreds of six to eight foot sharks can be thrust up into the clouds and dropped upon unsuspecting citizens along the coast.

By all means, enjoy the escapism that movies such as Sharknado and Sharknado 2 can provide, but certainly do not live with the fear of sharks falling from the sky.

Getting hit on the head by a falling catfish though is an entirely plausible thing and just might encourage someone to wear a hat when walking outside in the rain.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I am going to try to figure out which Ballpark is going to get hit by Sharknado the third which will be coming to the small screen next summer. Fenway Park anyone?

Copyright 2014 R. Anderson