Yes, the franchise lasted for TOO many movies. But I believe the "Sharknado" movies were one of the first collective enjoyable experiences on social media - back when we HAD collective enjoyable experiences on social media.
According to the Washington Post, the movie started as an inside joke.
As the ridiculous origin story goes, the term was actually a throwaway line in another Syfy movie, “Leprechaun’s Revenge.”
“There’s this town in the movie that’s, I guess, being besieged by leprechauns . . . and somebody says: ‘Gosh, I hope we don’t go the way of that other town. They never recovered after the sharknado hit,’ ” writer Thunder Levin told Vice. “One of the execs at Syfy, that stuck with them and they thought, ‘Hey, we should make a movie called “Sharknado!” ’ ”
For some reason, social media decided this was a collective experience that we could all share and love.
In July 2013, the entertainment industry was stunned when the low-budget TV movie about a deadly shark tornado in Los Angeles — starring Ian Ziering and Tara Reid — took over social media on a random Thursday night. Tweets about #Sharknado streamed in at a rate of 5,000 per minute. Celebrities joined in the gleeful chaos.
The key to the shared love of the movies on Twitter was the fact that the movies knew they were "brilliantly stupid" (as the Post put it) and this meant no scene was beyond the pale. I'll never forget watching one of the films with my wife when star Ian Ziering cut his way out of a shark using a chainsaw. That same shark had swallowed another character in an earlier scene and it was my perceptive spouse who said, " oh...no....he's going to reach in and pull out the other character."
Yep. And my wife laughed and clapped at the sheer audacity of it all.
The final film in the series aired this past weekend. Goodbye and thank you, Sharknado movies. I'll be glad to stream the "best" movies in the series (the first two) in future summers.