It was "Shark Week."

When fans of the Tarkanian-era University of Nevada-Las Vegas basketball teams wanted to intimidate their opponents, they didn't trot out their dusty Runnin' Rebel mascot, they cranked up the 'Jaws' music and made chomp-chomp-chomp with their arms.

Heck, when Austin Powers' pinky-gnawing nemesis Dr. Evil wanted to terrorize the world, he didn't want to do it with just laser beams, he wanted "sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!"

So there it is. From the Freudian depths of our subconscious to the big and little screens feeding us our entertainment, nothing says "you may soil yourself now" like the half-ton of corpse-pale, razor-toothed menace we think of as ...

"Shark!"

In American popular culture, nothing in the natural world is more terrifying — and thus more fascinating — than earth's oldest living genus.

Lions and tigers and bears? Big whoop. Hollywood knows its the gaping maw of a great white — not the toothy grins of Simba, Tigger or Balloo — that gives us that ice-water feeling in the pit of our stomachs.

'Shark tale' This 'Godfather'-inspired cartoon that packs in star voices opens tomorrow. Dreamworks

It hasn't always been this way, of course. When early mariners spoke of the terrors of the sea, the tales they spun were of serpents, giant squids and malicious whales.

It was a whale, not a shark, that swallowed Jonah in the Bible. And it was a whale, suffused with symbolic meaning, that dragged obsessed Ahab to his final resting place in Herman Melville's "Moby Dick."

Until the 1970s, sharks were bit players, menacing second bananas whose legendary appetites typecast them as more nuisance than threat. In "Moby Dick," sharks attack the carcasses of captured whales like vultures or rats or cockroaches. In Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea," they follow poor Santiago's boat back to shore, stripping to the bone the giant marlin that was to be his redemption.

And then — cue the trombones — came "Jaws." Based on a novel by Peter Benchley and directed by a 27-year-old Steven Spielberg, "Jaws" invented the summer blockbuster and redefined the horror-suspense genre in one bloody bite.

University of Hawai'i English professor Glenn Man recalls going to the old Waikiki 1 theater that summer in 1975, eager to see for himself what all the excitement was about.

"I was completely mesmerized," he said. "I liked it so much, I stayed for the second show."

Man, who specializes in film, narrative and 19th century literature, has been thinking a lot about "Jaws." He's writing a chapter for a book about film in the 1970s. His assignment is "1975."

"America was very fragile at that time," Man says. "Underlying everything that summer was the withdrawal from Vietnam, Watergate and Nixon's resignation.

"There has been speculation 'Jaws' tapped into the collective unconscious," he continues. "The shark was a sublimation of fears and anxieties that America had at that time."

'Finding Nemo' The sharks in this flick seemed more in need of Dr. Phil than human lunch. Advertiser library photo

'Tark the Shark' Basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian inspired folks to do the shark chomp. Advertiser library photo

"In the end, the sheriff (Roy Scheider) who had been timid at first, achieves manhood by shooting the oxygen tank and blowing up the shark," Man explains. "He became a real cowboy. It folds into the myth of the American cowboy."

Thus conquered, the shark that was our fear was put on parade in a series of knockoffs, parodies and cross-genre mutations.

"Saturday Night Live" was one of the first to play with the new pop-culture image, introducing the sublimely hilarious "Land Shark" — a landlubber shark that knocks on people's doors, pretending to deliver flowers, pizza and candy-grams — while the real "Jaws" was still playing in the theaters. The cartoon "Jabberjaw" followed a few months later, featuring a 21st-century shark who plays drums in a rock band and complains about getting "no respect."

And, of course, a string of inferior movies tried to capitalize on the killer-from-the-depths theme, including the not-forgettable-enough "Orca." Even "Jaws" slipped into self-parody with progressively inane sequels.

And who can forget "Happy Days" Episode No. 91, where Fonzi, having reached the absurd end of his character arc, dons swim trunks and water skis to jump over a shark?

The unfortunate episode, aired in 1977, has since been immortalized as a damning industry term — "jumping the shark" — referring to the point at which a formerly popular show officially goes into the tank.

By the time the Jimmy Carter administration ended, Americans had seemingly gotten over their shark fetish. With a few exceptions, most recently the support-group sharks in "Finding Nemo," who seem to be in a Dr. Phil-induced state of identity crisis, sharks seem to have left the spotlight for deeper and darker waters.

But out of sight in the theaters and on TV didn't necessarily mean out of mind in the real world. With the burgeoning popularity of surfing in the 1990s came an almost ghoulish interest in real-life shark attacks.

Though extremely rare statistically, shark attacks have drawn increased attention from media consumers to the point that the average American likely knows more about Bethany Hamilton, the teenage surfer from Kaua'i who lost part of her arm in a shark attack, than any of the world's top professional surfers.

The Discovery Channel recognized viewers' fascination with all things shark years ago with their immensely popular "Shark Week." The annual broadcast event routinely doubles the cable network's ratings.

And now sharks have returned to the theaters in a big way with two very different films: the bleak indie offering "Open Water" and Dreamwork's star-laden animated film "Shark Tale."

"Open Water," which cost a reported $120,000 to make and has grossed more than $24 million domestically, has been lauded as one of the best — and most unsettling — films of the year. Here there is no cowboy figure to save the young couple abandoned in shark-infested waters.

Might it be a stretch to suggest that, like "Jaws" almost 30 years earlier, the swarming sharks in "Open Water" also express a sort of collective national anxiety?

"There is a lot of American disillusionment with the war in Iraq and what our political leadership is doing," Man says. "It may be that the film expresses some of that anxiety and fear."

Kenny the Shark This eight-foot cartoon tiger shark has an endless appetite for adventure. Cartoon Network

This frightening scene is from the movie "Open Water." A UH scholar suggests the film may reflect collective anxiety over the Iraq war. Laura Lau • Lions Gate Films

Andrew Rossiter, director of the Waikiki Aquarium chuckles.

"Sorry," he says. "I'm still trying to picture Richard Nixon's face on a shark."

Rossiter says he hopes "Shark Tale" does well, if for no other reason than to soften the nasty stereotyping sharks have been subjected to over the years.

"Sharks have a bum rap," Rossiter says. "They're always picked as the bad guys."

Rossiter says that every shark is dangerous to some degree, but he pooh-poohs their reputation as malicious killing machines.

"Sharks are the biggest source of exaggeration," he says. "In movies, they're portrayed as constantly looking for people to eat. There's the idea that if they are harmed that they'll remember it forever and seek out the person who hurt them. That's nonsense."

Rossiter says the worst he's seen is a film called "Mako," in which captured sharks are programmed to kill by evil scientists. But the sharks escape and spend the rest of the film hunting down their captors.

Rossiter's favorite shark film is "Blue Water White Death," a 1971 release that follows scientists Rod and Valerie Taylor on the trail of great white sharks.

"It's a documentary movie, but it's still amazing," Rossiter says.

In fact, it was "Blue Water White Death" that inspired Benchley's novel, and the Taylors were hired as consultants on "Jaws" the film.

Still, Rossiter says, there has never been a film that has come close to capturing the paralyzing presence of a real shark in its natural environment.

"If you've ever seen them feeding on the dead whales, it's pretty damn impressive," he said. "There's no grace, just power."

Rossiter had his own up-close encounter with a shark during a recent trip to South Africa. He'd spotted a 15-foot shark approaching from a hundred yards away and asked to be lowered from the boat in a shark cage.

"It was just a shadow coming through the water," Rossiter says. "It cruised up and it was like the lights had gone out."

Rossiter had long suspected sharks respond to vibrations given off by their prey. Scientist that he is, he tested his idea by rubbing his knuckles together.

"He immediately turned and rammed the cage," Rossiter says.

"It doesn't matter what kind of training you have, if you see a shark and your heart doesn't beat 10 to the dozen, there's something wrong with you," Rossiter says. "There's never been anything on film or television that compares."