Okay, who has not imitated John Williams' shark-attack theme at any tense or potentially threatening moment? The music has been spoofed, referenced, and just plain ripped off in many movies and television shows. Richard Dreyfuss was haunted by it when he hosted Saturday Night Live in 1978. Sylvester Stallone hums it in Tango and Cash (1989). It's one of the most recognizable and quoted musical themes in cinema history.

The early days of Saturday Night Live, which debuted just a few months after Jaws was released, featured a recurring skit about a "landshark" who eats people, disguising himself most often as a door-to-door Candygram deliverer. The attacks, of course, are accompanied by a version of the shark theme.

The film's advertising image/logo-a woman swimming above an open-mouthed shark-was the basis for a number of political cartoons of the time.

The number of allusions to the movie in television shows and other films is too numerous to mention, from The Simpsons and Sanford and Son to the comedy Clerks (1994) and the drug drama Blow (2001).

Just as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) had made showers a new source of fear years before, Jaws created a terror of sharks that continues to this day, evidenced by the popularity of such pop culture events as the Discovery networks "Shark Week," a series of programs dedicated solely to the sea animal. Reduced beach attendance in 1975 was attributed to the anxiety caused by the movie, along with an increase in shark sightings. It is still regarded as responsible for ongoing negative stereotypes about sharks and their behavior and for leading to what has been known as the "Jaws effect," inspiring scores of fishermen to kill thousands of the animals in shark-fishing tournaments. This last aspect was documented by David Fleshler in a 2010 article in the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Sun Sentinel, noting that one-third of the world's sharks, skates, and rays were facing extinction. Conservation groups cite the movie as the reason it's so difficult to convince the public to protect the animals. Even Peter Benchley, years after the release, admitted he would not have written the novel if he had properly understood what sharks are really like in the wild.

Many films followed built around man-eating, often aquatic animals, among them Orca (1977), Alligator (1980), and Piranha (1978), which Spielberg declared "the best of the Jaws rip-offs." An Italian-produced horror movie, Great White (1981), was so similar it inspired Universal to sue the producers. The studio won the case, pulling the film from North American distribution and preventing it from ever being released on DVD here.

In addition to the imitators, Jaws spawned three sequels, each with vastly diminishing returns in box office and thrills: Jaws 2 (1978), Jaws 3-D (1983), and Jaws: The Revenge (1987). Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary, and Murray Hamilton returned for the first sequel, written by Carl Gottlieb and Howard Sackler (both worked on the original), again produced by David Brown and Richard Zanuck. Williams' score was used for this sequel. Gottlieb also worked on the script for the 3-D version, directed by Joe Alves, the production designer of the original. Lorraine Gary came out of retirement to appear in the final sequel. Spielberg had nothing to do with any of them.

Spielberg's comedy 1941 (1979) spoofs the opening scene of Jaws by having the original movie's doomed swimmer, Susan Backlinie, encountering a Japanese sub instead of a shark. John Williams' score for this scene is strikingly similar to his shark theme in Jaws.

Leaving the shoot before the film's final shot became a tradition with Spielberg that he carried through his next six productions. He reasoned that since Jaws was such a success, maybe the practice was a good luck charm.

by Rob Nixon