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Shark Week 2016's dates are revealed in bizarre new promo


Shark Week is returning the Discovery Channel as it does for a glorious seven-day span every year, and the first promo is here to announce its premiere date: Sunday, June 26.

The video is a strange one, that’s for sure. If Tim Burton were to create a Shark Week movie, this is close to what we’d expect the trailer to look like. It follows a man on a bizarre underwater journey, starting and ending on an inflatable raft. What brings him to the insane world below the surface is a jolt that knocks him into the water and sinks him down into the ocean’s depths. There, he encounters numerous sharks (naturally), but also a mermaid who dissolves into bubbles and an underwater circus, complete with a red-jacket-clad ringmaster.

Perhaps even stranger are the times in the promo when sharks collide — one splinters into an entire school of fish, and later, a four-shark pile-up explodes into what looks like blood. It’s a memorable 30 seconds, to say the least, and it does its job of alerting fans to Shark Week’s premiere. When it arrives in June, Shark Week 2016 guarantees us lots of “shark n’ awe.”

Although the promo doesn’t exactly stay true to real life as Shark Week did last year, we expect another fascinating lineup of shark-based programming. The finned creatures have been given the spotlight by Discovery since the ’80s, with this summer’s event marking its 29th year.

A lineup has not yet been announced, but the network told Yahoo TV that we’ll see “sharks will face off with dolphins, seals, crocodiles and even humans.” It sounds like Shark Week’s official Twitter account was right to promise a wild ride when it programming kicks off this summer.

Stephanie Topacio Long
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Stephanie Topacio Long is a writer and editor whose writing interests range from business to books. She also contributes to…
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