'Sharknado 2' director on creating the movie's 'silly' theme song

Anthony C. Ferrante didn’t justdirect Syfy’s Sharknado 2: The Second One:He also composed and sang on the TV movie’s theme song, “(The Ballad of) Sharknado.”

Ferrante had trouble getting rights to music for the Sharknado movies because of budgetary restraints, so he and his musically inclined friend Robbie Rist formed the band Quint for the sole purpose of creating Sharknado theme music. Quint’s not the first time the pair recorded songs together though; Ferrante and Rist compose the music for each of the director’s films.

“The joke is: Every movie we break up and then we reform as a new band, even though it’s just the two of us,” Ferrante tells EW. “So then for Sharknado, it was obvious we needed to call ourselves Quint in honor of the Robert Shaw character from Jaws.”

“(The Ballad of) Sharknado” first debuted during the end credits of the original Sharknado, but because the song played so late in the movie, few people actually heard it. Ferrante loved the music so much that he decided to bring it back for the sequel, placing it right in the movie’s intro to make sure everyone heard it. The band also released an EP on Tuesday called Great White Skies, which includes the theme song plus the other Quint-composed music from the film.

The Ramones-inspired theme song is undeniably catchy, with its obvious ’80s rock associations and simplistic, ridiculous lyrics (example: “Run away from the Sharknado / It’s your biggest foe, foe, foe”). But no matter how radio-friendly it might—or might not—sound, the song was never meant to be taken seriously. “The thing with Sharknado, the first movie, it was just a fun, silly movie and we needed a song that captured that silliness,” Ferrante says. “The song is the spirit of the movie. We can have fun and not everything has to be super serious.”