UNIVERSAL STUDIOS FLORIDA
JAWS
1990–2012
Welcome to Amity!
JAWS was one of the rides that defined the original Universal Studios Florida.
The first version opened with the park on June 7, 1990, and became famous for the wrong reason. It broke. Universal closed it and rebuilt it. The version people remember reopened in 1993 and ran until January 2, 2012.
You boarded an Amity boat tour, went out on the lagoon, and found out Brody had not solved the shark problem.
AT A GLANCE
ORIGINAL VERSION
June 7, 1990 – August 1990
REBUILT VERSION
1993 – January 2, 2012
PARK
Universal Studios Florida
AREA
Amity
ATTRACTION TYPE
Boat ride / outdoor water attraction
REPLACED BY
The Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Diagon Alley
FROM THE JAWS ARCHIVE
Videos, photographs and stories preserved from the waters of Amity.
Amity
The ride sat inside a town. Fishing boats, weathered fronts, docks, a lighthouse, Captain Jake’s Amity Boat Tours, and the hanging shark you could stand under for a photo.
By the time you boarded, the place already had a history.
The shark could go under.
Amity stayed around you.
The Ride
A live skipper took the boat out. It started as a tour. Then another boat went down, a fin showed, and the skipper called for help.
The shark came up beside you, dropped away, and hit from somewhere else. You tried to hide in a boathouse. Bad move.
It followed the boat to the gas dock.
Help is on the way… in ten minutes.
“Ten minutes! We’ll be shark bait in ten minutes!”
Fire. Heat. Water. The skipper shooting.
The last hit was at the electrical cable. The shark hit the cable, the water erupted, and the boat limped back in like the tour was still on the schedule.
The Sharks
They ran on underwater tracks and had to meet a moving boat through spray and fire.
When it worked, you got the fin, then nothing, then the shark next to the gunwale.
The 1993 ride used several figures, each built for one attack.
Mechanical, wet, and not subtle.
The Original Ride
The 1990 version is not the one most people rode.
The effects were ambitious and the sharks wouldn’t reliably hit their cues. Universal shut it down and rebuilt most of the show.
Some of the lagoon stayed.
The ride that came back in 1993 is the one that lasted.
Why It Closed
The lagoon covered roughly seven acres in the middle of the park, along with boats, several sharks, fire effects, and all the maintenance that went with them. Universal wanted the land.
Amity came out for Diagon Alley, which opened in 2014.
Nothing from the ride system was reused.
Amity had to go.
What’s Left
The lagoon, the lighthouse, the boats, and Captain Jake’s are gone.
The hanging shark photo spot survived and moved to San Francisco.
A few small nods to Amity are still buried around Diagon Alley.
The rest lives on in home videos, ride-throughs, maps, postcards, and photos of the town.
The shark was the poster.
Amity is the part that disappeared.
That may be the part worth preserving most.
