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I watched the original Sharknado, Enough Said back in 2013. I mean, I had to. So did millions of other people apparently. For some reason I missed the second installment, Sharknado 2: The Second One, Shark Happens. Which makes my decision to watch the latest an odd decision. Because after you've seen one Sharknado show, you pretty much have the formula down.
But little did I know that the NBC/Universal/Comcast conglomerate had other plans for this unsuspecting viewer. Not only did Sharknado 3 provide us with visual treats you (literally...) don't see everyday--if ever, but this media powerhouse pumped into their little program so much marketing and cross promotion, I wondered if this was an outlandish made-for-TV-movie about shark superstorms wreaking havoc or an all-out two-hour advertisement for all things NBC.
It boggled my mind how much they crammed into one little show. Half the show takes place at Universal Theme Park in Florida where they showcased the Xfinity NASCAR race cars which ties in nicely with theme park NBC owns and the Xfinity NASCAR championship NBC sponsors.
Not to be outdone, as the Tara Reid character needs desperately to find her daughter in the before-mentioned theme park, they access the free wifi available to Xfinity customers. Using this amazing app, they locate the daughter's cellphone--it's an NBC miracle!
The show is filled to the gils with cameos, both from actors pretending to be someone else, and celebrities appearing as themselves. In the end, it really doesn't matter because both Bill Engvall and the entire cast of the Today show all end as shark food.
What surprised me most about this show wasn't the fognado, Malcolm from Malcolm in the Middle having each limb eaten by sharks until he self-destructs, a shark storm so powerful that it can peel away the walls of the White House and yet the actors are not affected in any way by the storm, either Mark Cuban as POTUS or Ann Coulter as the first lady, sharks being able to live not in the ocean but above the earth in the clouds, two civilians being able to operate an F-4 jet to disrupt a sharknado directly over a NASCAR race which leaves falling sharks to eat several race officials, the showcasing of Universal Studio Theme Park Florida's newest roller coaster where a huge shark actually slides back and forth on track until it eventually slides up and eats WWE star Chris Jericho as the ride official, the reinstatement of the space shuttle program or having David Hasselhoff as a "never made it to space" astronaut that pilots the shuttle through a shark-filled sky only to have sharks defy gravity and fly up into space and attack the space shuttle stranding The Hoff on the moon where he kills sharks that also made it the 238,857 miles to the moon, that both Ian Ziering and Tara Reid re-entered earth's atmosphere inside giant sharks that ate them (while in space) then having Ian punch through the still-smoldering shark carcass and deploy three parachutes (a al the Apollo capsules...) and Tara Reid actually give birth while in the falling-to-earth shark then cutting herself out of the dead animal using implanted chainsaw arm.
No, what surprised me most about the show was all the marketing.
* Photo used without permission from: http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2015/07/18/tune-in-to-syfys-sharknado-week-with-s
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