More made-for-TV shark movies, please

Sharknado was so three weeks ago, I know, but that’s exactly when I usually like to jump on a bandwagon, after mostly everybody’s already gotten off. Can you imagine what it would have been like for me to make some Sharknado comments at the same time as everybody else in the country? They would have been drowned in an ocean of exactly the same stuff. But I find that if you wait a few weeks, it’ll be over, most people have already stopped talking about it, and now I’m free to join in, uninterrupted.

sharknado

Besides, I’m not here to talk about Sharknado anyway, I’m here to talk about other ideas for made-for-TV sci-fi movies. Like Sharkcountant. What would you do if you brought your taxes in to get filed, only to find a shark sitting behind the desk? Would you freak out? I mean, I’d be scared initially, like, if it’s a shark, they’re pretty nasty looking, all of those rows of teeth. But the movie would have to make at least a little sense, and so yeah, he’d still look like a shark, but he’d probably be able to talk. I don’t know how difficult it would be for a shark to pass his CPA exam, but I’m guessing he’d have to behave at least well enough to get through business school, to get hired, eventually starting his own practice.

And so yeah, maybe Sharkcountant might be a little boring. It would make for a great ten-minute intro. Like you’d see the shark, but he’d be wearing a tie, maybe some glasses, and as the main character tries to run away, the shark would have to beg him to stop screaming, “Please! I know how this looks, but I assure you I’m an accountant. I won’t eat you, I promise!”

Obviously, Sharkitect, that’s a title just begging for a low-budget production. But that’s got to be a hard directorial choice to make, do you go for an anthropomorphic shark going through the above scenario, going to architecture school, finding an apprenticeship willing to at least entertain the idea of employing a shark? Or do you take it in a different direction? Maybe this movie is underwater, deep below the sea there’s maybe like a shark civilization, and they live in buildings designed for sharks, by sharks. And it could just be the tale of a sharkitect with a vision, a dream to bust into the rarified world of high-end sharkitecture.

I guess … that’s it? When I started writing this, Sharkcountant popped into my head almost immediately. I had this false sense that this whole thing was going to write itself. It’d be easy, I’d just make shark jokes and combine shark with other non-shark words and, you know, basically what they do whenever they make one of those shark movies for TV. But I wrote out the Sharkcountant paragraph, and then I was like, huh, there’s still a lot of empty page that I’m going to have to cover.

And then I sat here for like twenty minutes, eventually getting to the point where I was just looking for any word that could handle being merged with the word shark. Sharkitect. Done. But again, I really didn’t have anything to say besides the whole underwater thing, and let’s be honest, that was kind of boring, right?

Another twenty minutes of staring off into space, then some brainstorming. Shark Therapy. Pool shark. The Curious Life of Sharkamin Button. Sharkano, like half shark, half volcano.

And that’s when I realized I wasn’t going anywhere, Sharkano, one because I’d have to explain it, it’s a title that doesn’t speak for itself. People would see it and be like, Sharkano? What is that, like half shark half … what? And then maybe the subtitle would be, “Half shark, half volcano.” But even then, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Maybe a volcano that spews out sharks instead of lava, but I feel that’s kind of just ripping off the Sharknado, a tornado comprised of sharks.

What if I keep it simple? What about a crossover? I could do like Sharkcountant Meets the Sharkitect. You know, maybe the Sharkitect finally does start his own small architecture firm, but he’s bad with numbers, so he needs to hire an accountant. And maybe a few regular human accountants interview for the position, but right before he makes the decision, Sharkcountant walks in.

The Sharkitect obviously wants to pick the other shark, but he doesn’t want to make it look like he’s playing favorites, so he just tells everyone that he went with someone who’d make a better fit. Eventually it would blow up, they’d realize that they have too little in common once they got past the fact that they’re both sharks. And that could lead to the long awaited Sharkitect vs. Sharkcountant, they’d get angry, their true shark natures would tear through and they’d have to fight to the death.

All right, I’m bored. I wish I had never jumped on this bandwagon. Sharknado was fun while it lasted, but did anybody else watch it? It was awful. It wasn’t even funny awful. I didn’t even watch the whole thing. After like fifteen minutes I took stock of my life, I was like, I’m really sitting here watching this? And did anybody else think that there were way too many commercials?