The author of a book
about the old Jaws ride at Universal says the original version — before the one that ran more than a decade — created multiple issues for the park.
A certain toothy-but-troubled attraction at Universal Studios Florida theme park is gone, but it’s not forgotten, especially by Dustin McNeill, author of “Adventures in Amity: Tales From the Jaws Ride.”
“‘Jaws’ is my favorite movie, so it’s kind of natural thing that Jaws would be my favorite ride,” says McNeill, a lifelong theme-park enthusiast. He interviewed dozens of people, including park executives, engineers, architects and skippers for the shark ride, which closed in January 2012 to make room for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley.
The storyline for Jaws: The Ride featured a bucolic boat ride where something goes terribly wrong. Art imitated life when the attraction got off to a rocky start during the theme park’s 1990 debut.
“The original 1990 openingdate Jaws ride was a disaster. It was only open for about two and half months before Universal shut it down and sued the ride makers,” said McNeill, who lives in Greensboro, N.C. The author found creators of the original ride were willing to talk about the experience.
“They had opinions on it and still thought it was a great, ambitious attraction that they were trying to do,” McNeill said. “They were very candid. To hear these perspectives that, to my knowledge, had never been spoken on publicly before was really interesting.”
The original version of the mechanical-shark ride had more complicated effects than the one that ran at Universal for more than a decade. Under Plan A, “the shark actually bit onto the front of the boat, popped the pontoon and dragged it through the water,” McNeill said.
It was difficult to get the timing and the alignment right, and the boat would sometimes knock out the teeth of the shark, he said. “It broke quote often,” McNeill said. In the original finale, intended to repeat dozens of times daily, a grenade was shot into the mouth of the animal, causing an underwater explosion, similar to the climax of the 1975 movie, he said.
“Bloody shark guts and chum and water go flying up into the air, and that signifies the death of the shark,” he said.
In 1993, the park introduced a new version of Jaws: The Ride, which has made a lasting impact on McNeill.
“It was just such a real experience. It was outdoors, on the water, all the elements were there,” he said. “I just think that made it a little scarier, because you weren’t inside a show building for most of the ride.”
“Adventures in Amity” is the fourth book for McNeill, who works at a hospital. The first three books were about filmmaking in the horror genre.
“I’d really love to branch out, and this is my first chance to do that,” he said. “I feel like I could write 10 more books about parts of the theme-park industry that interest me.”
The back cover of “Adventures in Amity” indicates that the book is “not endorsed by or affiliated with Universal Studios Florida or Universal Pictures.”
McNeill’s Jaws ride research exposed him to the subculture of the skippers, the Universal team members who steered the boats, rattled off monologues and guided visitors away from certain faux danger.
“They had fun working at Jaws. That was much more of subculture at Universal than I realized -and even still is,” he said. “It’s its own community. Those skippers were so passionate for that job.”
Shark malfunctions created challenges for the skippers.
“Just because the shark didn’t work as planned didn’t mean the ride was over,” McNeill said. The skippers “still had another four or five minutes that they had to spiel for to keep it exciting. To hear how they would cover that oftentimes with humor is pretty funny.”
McNeill came to Orlando during the final days of Jaws: The Ride.
“It really felt like the end of an era,” he said. “We still had E.T. [ride], but we’ve lost so many iconic opening-day attractions. … It felt silly at the time, but a lot of people felt sad. I felt sad.”