From Spuds MacKenzie to Sam Adams, there have been many beer spokesmen over the years, but none of them can beat Quint, the Narragansett chugging shark hunter from Stephen Spielberg's Jaws. Played by Robert Shaw, Quint was a survivor of the U.S.S. Indianapolis who watched hundreds of his fellow sailors eaten alive by sharks. For sheer manliness, Quint's the kind of beer spokesperson that makes Dos Equis's The Most Interesting Man Alive look like a milksop.
So to celebrate both the film's 29th anniversary and the Fourth of July weekend (when all of Jaws's shark attacks happened), the company is re-releasing the beer with the now iconic 1975 can design.
Narragansett owes much to Jaws. Thanks to the beer's very noticeable presence in the classic film, awareness of Narragansett was kept alive through the dark years in which the ailing 125-year-old brand was passed from owner to owner, before being triumphantly relaunched in 2006. Since then, capitalizing on its legacy from what just might be the greatest single act of product placement ever, Narragansett even has considerable market cachet in certain regions of the U.S. As such, Narragansett has gone from being the beer your granddad drinks to the beer of bad-ass shark killers.
Thanks to the re-release, Jaws fans can now contemptuously crush a can of 'Gansett with one hand with utmost fidelity to Robert Shaw's performance in Jaws, with perhaps one big exception: a portion of sales proceeds will be going to support shark conservation efforts in the Atlantic Ocean, something that Captain Sam Quint would definitely not approve of. Quint's not a spokesman you want to get on the wrong side of, Narragansett.