Did you catch the “instant camp classic” Sharknado last night on SyFy?
If you did, you’re not alone — if Twitter is any gauge, and Toure is to be believed, at the Sharknado peak, it was hoppin’. 5,000 tweets per minute were clocked on the Sharknado tip, and an average of 2.7 tweets per minute (a metric we are now currently using, everyone) were registered per Sharknado watching Twitter user.
If you weren’t tuned in, you’re probably saying, “hey, Kim, what exactly is a Sharknado ? And please, stop saying that word.”
For the uninitiated, Sharknado is, of course, the newest summer flick from SyFy, the sort any drive-in movie theater of eras past would be thrilled to carry.
Like Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus before it, Sharknado is a fun and frivolous improbable horror flick starring our 90s idols — this time, instead of Tiffany and Debbie Gibson, it was Ian Ziering and Tara Reid.
Even the National Weather Service got in on Sharknado mania — which, since we’ve not explained, involves a tornado that picks up and rains down bitey, bitey sharks:
As with any waterspout or tornado, the best advice is to be in an interior part of the lowest floor of a sturdy building—and not outside, whether sharks are raining down or not.
And on that note, Sharknado felt particularly topical with yesterday’s bizarre waterspout news.
But yesterday we saw a waterspout… will we ever be so lucky as to see a Sharknado ?
Harold Brooks, a senior scientist at NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory, was a total wet blanket on the idea, telling Mother Jones that yeah, he guesses it could happen… but it isn’t very likely, sigh:
“There are records of small fish being picked up by waterspouts, but sharks are pretty big and that makes it a lot harder… And how are they gonna survive outside of the water? My guess is if [the tornado] gets some baby sharks, they might get thrown. But they wouldn’t do a whole lot of damage—assuming they live.”
Boo. Brooks added:
“The sharks would not be in very good shape.”
Did you love Sharknado , like every single Twitter user tuning in?