Have you ever been to a drive-in movie?
I've been to two of them, and I thought I'd reminisce just a little about those experiences. My friend Quiggy is hosting Celebrate the Drive-In Week over at his blog, The Midnite Drive-In, and that seemed like the perfect time to look back at these two separate occasions.
I was born in 1980, so I missed the wondrous days of drive-in movie theaters being common. The summer I was eighteen, my dad learned that there was a drive-in movie theater in eastern Tennessee about three hours from our home in western North Carolina. He decided he should take our family to that because drive-ins were going extinct, and he wanted my brother and I to experience one.
I vividly remember getting to see the trailer for The Mask of Zorro (1998) there -- I was already very excited for that movie to come out, and seeing the trailer for it at the drive-in was way more exciting for me than anything to do with a giant lizard. But it's nice to be able to say I saw a monster movie at a drive-in, since they are kind of the essential drive-in fare, I think.
My second time at a drive-in theater was at the Big Sky Drive-In in the Wisconsin Dells. This venue is still operating! I'm hoping I might be able to take my teens there this summer, actually. If there's anything good playing. (They're playing really good stuff right now and I am mad that we aren't taking our family vacation right this minute, sigh.)
Anyway, my husband and I went on a date to the Big Sky Drive-in to see... Cars (2006). And if you think that watching Cars while sitting in your car at a drive-in theater must have been about the most perfectly meta movie-going experience you could ever get... it was. It was fantastic. The part during the credits where all the cars are watching movies at a drive-in, and we were watching that at a drive-in -- I mean, it just does not get any cooler!
Plus, Cars is actually a really good movie. I love it. I've seen it umpteen times, because my two oldest kids were absolutely besotted with it when they were very small, but I still love it.
Don't forget to check out the blog party! I'll be reviewing The Outsiders (1983) for it later this week.
I'm not entirely certain there were drive-ins still left in south Texas in 1998. Of course, by then I was 7 years into a self-imposed "no car or driver's license" stage, so I wouldn't have been able to go even if there was.
ReplyDeleteQuiggy, yeah, that one in eastern Tennessee was the only one anyplace near where we lived. It did have folding chairs up front for people who walked in...
DeleteI think that's hilarious that your dad took you all that way to see a movie at a drive-in, then didn't stay for it all.
ReplyDeleteWe went at least once back in the day, maybe two times? I can't actually remember, nor do I remember what we saw. I remember it was awkward sitting in the back seat trying to watch a movie out the front window, I remember the sound on the radio... and that's about the extent of what I remember from actually attending. I don't think any of us really liked the experience compared to going to a 70mm screening.
I have much stronger memories of driving home at night from visits with family and craning my head to see what was playing at the drive-ins along the route. Now that was fun. There was one that was five giant screens all facing each other, and you could see them from the freeway. So we'd try to identify what was actually playing on each of them as we drove past. That was exciting and great fun as a child for some reason. ROFL!
DKoren, oh, that was standard procedure for my dad. When I was like 5, he and Mom joined a Community Concert Association, and we would go to one concert/performance every month from September through May... and always leave during the intermission. So we could get the kids home to go to bed at a reasonable time, since these concerts usually started at 7 and were 40 minutes from our house, and our bedtime was 9pm. We saw half of The Nutcracker performed as a marionette show. Half of every concert. Half of the occasional musical they did instead of a concert. Half of a ballet.
DeleteWhen we went to see fireworks shows for the Fourth of July, we would leave before it was over so we could get on the road before the crowds. Including the year I was like 16 and we went to Washington DC for the 4th -- we watched the fireworks through the rear window of the car as we drove away. We also left as soon as a movie was over and did not stay for the credits...
And we'd sometimes leave minor league baseball games during the final inning to beat the traffic out of the park.
In fact, the only two times I can remember going to some kind of live show and NOT leaving before the end are when we went to see a figure skating show in 1995 where we got to see amazing people like Kurt Browning and Scott Hamilton, and the time we went to see Hayley Mills in The King and I on stage when I was 17.
Was this astonishingly aggravating? Yes. Was it just how life was? Also yes. Do I now stay allllll the way through the end credits of every single movie just because I can? A definite yes.
That's really fun catching glimpses of drive-ins as you drove past! I would get a kick out of that myself.