We're Gonna Need a Bigger Christmas Tree for Hallmark's Jaws Keepsake Ornament

Hallmark normally does a good job at serving the holiday season needs of geeks by offering high-quality Christmas tree ornaments that depict characters, vehicles and scenes from franchises such as Star Trek and Star Wars, as well as DC and Marvel Comics. This year's selection of ornaments is going to be a great one for me, because Hallmark is releasing ornaments based on two of my all-time favorite creature features: Alien and Jaws.

The Alien ornament won't arrive in Hallmark stores until October, but the Jaws ornament was recently released as part of the summer kickoff for this year's Keepsake Ornament line. I picked up my Jaws ornament last weekend and it's a beauty, a worthy addition to any movie monster fan's Christmas tree. Read on for more details and pictures of this super cool ornament.

Given its scale and price, Hallmark's Jaws ornament doesn't come close to the level of detail as Shark City Ozark's mechanical shark replicas; nevertheless, it's a respectable representation of Joe Alves' original design at an affordable price, making it a welcome collectible for "finatics" who are on a tight budget. All the parts of the shark--the mouth size, abdominal girth, and fins--are scaled to each other in ways that match the movie shark's proportions, so you know that it’s a replica from Jaws and not just a generic shark ornament. The ornament also comes with three yellow flotation barrels harpooned into its back, just the way Quint did to the shark in the second half of Jaws.

Of course, what would a piece of Jaws merchandise be without John Williams' signature theme? The ornament comes with two batteries that you install into the bottom of the shark and you press a button to hear the theme to play out of a tiny speaker located under the shark's belly--almost as if the shark had succeeded in eating Williams and his entire orchestra.

If it were up to me, there would be a large box set of Jaws ornaments that includes replicas of each of the franchise's mechanical sharks as well as various other items from the movies (e.g., Ben Gardner's damaged boat from Jaws, the bloody beached killer whale from Jaws 2, the partially eaten Sea World diver from Jaws 3D, etc.) to give your Christmas tree a complete monster shark makeover. It would even include a toy train set to put around the base of your tree that's modeled after the Jaws segment of the backlot tour of Universal Studios in Hollywood. But since we'll never have that, Hallmark's Jaws Keepsake Ornament is the next best thing.