Happy JAWGUST everyone! If you are seeing this post but have no idea what JAWGUST is, you can go to jawgust.fansnotexperts.com and see for yourself! It’s my month long podcast celebration of all things JAWS. I originally did this in 2020 as a fun project where I watched JAWS every day that month and did a podcast every day as well.
I brought it back in 2025 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the movie, but this time instead of watching the movie 31 times in 31 days, I decided to watch the movie only one time – over that 31 days. So I would only watch a few minutes at a time and podcast about those few minutes.
While I don’t think I could bring myself to watch any of the sequels every day for a month – watching them a few minutes at a time seemed not only possible – but also probable! In fact it would be downright irresponsible for me to NOT do it.
And thus, JAWGUST 2 was born, and this month I am not only watching JAWS 2 a little bit at a time, but I decided to read the JAWS 2 novelization, which someone very generously scanned into the Internet Archive.
I finally finished the book yesterday morning and you can hear many of my thoughts on it in various episodes of JAWGUST 2, including yesterday’s entry.
But to give you a bird’s eye view of it – I didn’t really like the book, but I really liked and am glad that I read it. Does that make sense? I liked experiencing a story that was based on an earlier version of the JAWS 2 script and was so vastly different that it felt like I was reading an original story in the “JAWS Universe.”
I also felt like it was actually a sequel to JAWS novel rather than the movie, which makes little sense to me. Maybe the author decided to take that route once he realized the film script was basically being rewritten? Or at least maybe he added some details to that effect. I can’t imagine why the screenwriters would go that route.
The mention to how the original shark died, another storyline included the Mafia, Brody’s suspicion of his wife and Hooper – and their relationship in itself – all felt like it was based on the book, and all of that took away from this story in my opinion.
And don’t get me started on the seal that basically became a Brody family pet – one that Ellen Brody got jealous of. Plus there was a pharmacist trying to blackmail the town, or at least hide the secret that there’s another shark (or that the original shark never died), an out of town cop (who shot that seal) that Brody seemed to really have it in for – even if that guy was a prick.
And the older kids (still younger than the movie) were training to SCUBA dive, and also have a sailboat race (instead of just hanging out on boats with their friends).
Almost every difference in this book actually made me appreciate the movie that much more. The fact that Carl Gottlieb took that script and turned into the movie we got actually turned out to be quite impressive.
But as much as I did not think this book was good, again I still am very glad I read it and enjoyed not enjoying it. There was no novelization for the third JAWS movie, but this author does return to write on for the final installment.
So, let’s do this again in a couple years, shall we?