Going to the drive-in movie

He went in his camper.

 

Saw Superman III, ET, and Bambi, among others, at the drive-in when I was a kid. Parents had two-door 1973 or 1974 Oldsmobile Omega with a big trunk so me and my siblings had a place to sleep when we conked out midway through the first movie.

 

Hey it always seemed like a great activity when I was a kid.
Instead of pounding beers and smoking pot in the parking lot before the movie, you just keep on going through the whole movie.
Should've been right up my alley as a youth.


(For some reason writing that post just made me think of 'Pee Wee's Big Adventure.' Saw the matinee. Smoke just rolling out of the car before we went into the theater. We were so high. It was a disgrace.)

 

Remembered seeing Tommy at a drive-in. Think I was five or six. That was a trip.

(It wasn't in first run, it was a few years after it came out. You had to go 50 miles to see first run movies back then.)

 

All the ones around our house have gotten rid of the speakers you put on the window, making a dead battery a very real possibility every time you go. Which keeps us from going.

I remember being devastated when my family went in our 1989 GMC Safari to go see "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" at the drive-in and it was sold out.

The notion that a drive-in movie would be so popular these days that it would sell out seems funny.

 

My first drive-in movie was Blazing Saddles when I was 6 or 7. I obviously didn't get the jokes.

In the same city, there was a XXX drive-in that had titles like, "Pinocchio: It Isn't His Nose That Grows" on the marquee. Even as a kid I knew what that was about. They had some sort of setup where you couldn't see the screen outside of the drive-in property. I think if you went there and had penis size anxiety, seeing a 40-foot dick on the screen wouldn't do anything for your self-confidence.

In my high school town, they had all-night drive-in nights at the beginning and end of summer. Total drunk-fest with plenty of fights. I can't remember any of the movies.

 

I have fond memories of seeing them as a kid, piled into the bed of my dad's pickup truck with blankets, pillows and snacks. The nearest one (about an hour away) closed down years ago, but the screen and the sign still stand, with weeds growing up through the cracks in the parking lot. It's fabulously creepy. I'd like to get onto the property someday to take some photographs with the Milky Way rising above it.

 

It wouldn't surprise me if the one we went to was damn near a sell-out.

 

At my high school's football field, you could go to the highest row of the visitors' stand and sit backwards and watch a drive-in movie. Not all of the movies that we saw were family-friendly.

Now, there's a drive-in about 35 miles from us, and we go a few times a year. It costs $10 a car to get in, and we take our own food and drinks and lawn chairs. The kids like it and it's cheap entertainment.

 

There were a couple a short drive from us in the Toronto burbs, back in the 80s, buddy of mine had a 73 LTD so we would get a case of beer, maybe a couple pizzas or a bucket of KFC and go to the five-movie Dusk-to-Dawn showings....pack it in after the second or third movie, his car would smell like a toxic waste dump when we headed home

 

When I was a kid in the 1970s, my parents would take me and my sister to from time-to-time, mainly G-rated stuff. Of course we weren't old enough to really sit through a movie, so I don't remember much of those. Eventually, we were old enough for Mom or Dad to just drop us off at the local theater's matinee showing.

After moving to a different town in my teens, we had one drive-in my friends and I would go to in the '80s. I saw the first "Back to the Future" in a twinbill with "European Vacation." That was probably the best one I saw there.

That drive-in closed quite a few years ago, but the screen and the snack-bar/projection building are still there, with weeds covering up most of the facility. A recycler rents out the space in the back of the lot for his business, which is the only use that property gets. The screen and marquee are old and kind of an eyesore IMO. I'd just as soon see it get torn down, but it costs money and anytime someone suggests it, there's always a small, vocal group talking about preserving it as a historical landmark.

There's still one drive-in operating in the town about 20 miles away. My sister and her husband take their kids there once in a while.

 

I really enjoyed it as a night out for the family, and not just in a nostalgic sense.

FWIW, I think "movies in the park" often now fill the void that drive-in closings have left. There are a bunch of them in our town and the next town over throughout the summer. They aren't typically first-run, but for example they were showing "Secret Life of Pets" on an outdoor screen during a camping event at the park a couple weeks ago. They have some other movie showings throughout the summer like "Finding Dory," etc.