This came to me last week when I saw #3 on TCM. Â A hard shot back to my childish past: of jammies in public and speakers on the car window and rootbeer in mugs.
All mine are from The Golden Age of the Drive-In; feel free to theme-up however you prefer. Â But consider what you’d like to watch at an outdoor theater…in your front seat…in public.
5. Â Parent Trap (1961): The original, bien sur. Â And the perfect curtain-raiser on my series.
4. Â Yours, Mine, and Ours (1968): Again, the original. Â Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda in an affecting — and not at all p.c. — tale of blended families. Â Check out a very young Tim Matheson, pre-Otter, as Fonda’s eldest.
3. With Six You Get Eggroll (1968): Another Brian Keith flick, and another blended family story from the same year. Â This was Doris Day’s last film, and to watch it, even now, is to mourn the third career she might have had in movies: the Mom. Â Barbara Hershey plays Keith’s daughter, and Jamie Farr & William Christopher debut as hippies, pre-M*A*S*H.
2. Â Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961): I always preferred Deborah Walley’s Frances Lawrence to Sandra Dee’s. Â Here she’s on vaca, torn between sunny Michael Callan and stormy James Darren, who sings the catchy title tune (“It’s not the same/down by the sea/Since the Gidget came/to Waikiki…”). Â And now it’s in my head.
1. Blue Hawaii (1961): Of course, end with Elvis, and tie up the Aloha! theme — see how I did that? Â I think this was my favorite soundtrack of all his films.
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Drive-ins are mostly before my time… though there’s one here in town that does a good business with the low-grade FM radio sound broadcast…
1. Pee Wee’s Big Adventure… the drive-in plays a big part… and that’s just about right.
2. Halloween… the drive in seems tailor made for a horror movie to me and not so much the big epic.
I got nothing… I’ll have to think about it.
You must be younger than me a bit, I saw Star Wars in the drive-in. Backseat of my dad’s Falcon, somewhere in Ft Worth.
The folks took us to see these at the drive-in:
Lt Robinson Crusoe USN (1966) Dick van Dyke and Nancy Kwan(hubba hubba)
Cat Ballou (1965) Lee Marvin and Jane Fonda(before becoming a treasonous B***H)
Wankette picked Doris Day’s “With Six You Get Eggroll”??? I love that movie! I adore Doris Day and as I say about things or people that others might consider corny: I love Doris Day and I don’t care who knows it. That movie is very funny and I think Doris Day and Brian Keith had some chemistry going there.
I’ll return with a list if I can get over you taking “The Parent Trap”, “Blue Hawaii”, “Yours, Mine and Ours” and Floyd’s choice of “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure”.
By the way, Floyd, drive-ins may have been before your time in Texas but they survived well into my teenage years here in Ohio. There aren’t as many as back in the day but we have two that still show movies every summer within a 10 mile radius of home.
he ones in Dallas went to pron movies in the early ’70s… I did see Silent Running in a drivein when I was like 5 and Foxfire (Firefox? the Clint Eastwood Russian jet flick) in Colorado when I was 13 or 14 in a drive-in
Wow…hard to imagine that ‘genre’ in an outdoor venue. Or maybe I can. Eewwww.
That is funny, I also saw “Firefox” at our local drive in with my dad, when I was 14 too. The second feature was “Escape from New York.” We watched the first five minutes, then Kurt Russell said the “f” word and we left. That same night my mom took my sister to see “E.T.,” and I still have yet to see that one.
I can’t believe I have never seen “With Six You Get Eggroll!” I have never even heard of it, that I know of and I LOVE Brian Keith and Doris Day. I love the education we get around here.
It’s a must see for you, Tink. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. Brian Keith at the height of his Brian Keith-ness and Doris Day is always wonderful. Not only does the movie have William Christopher and Jamie Farr but there are other notable familiar faces in the movie. George Carlin is in it too.
Check out this link and see how many familiar faces there are in this scene:
Got yer back, TCW, and love the clip. Though just a role, Jamie Farr just got added to the short list of tolerable hippies … plus Sam the Butcher, though not bringin’ Alice da meat — dig!
Thanks, Eric! Should I trust that the embed code on YouTube will work?
I think Carlin is in this clip too in his car hop uniform. A little too quick to tell but that’s the role he played.
I love “With Six You Get Eggroll”. I was fortunate to be able to attend the world premiere of the film in August, 1968 in Boston. I was 15 at the time and absolutely loved the film, thinking Doris Day just had to be about the best mother anyone could ever have. While it was Miss Day’s last film, she could not have chosen a better way to close out her film career. It turned out to be one of the top ten moneymaking movies of the 39 pictures she appeared in, bringing in the most money since her 1963 release, “Move Over, Darling”. I first saw it at the Orpheum in Boston and the packed theatre of several thousand burst into prolonged applause when Miss Day’s name appeared on the screen. She wasn’t in attendance but I’m sure she heard it all the way in California. When I later saw it at a drive-in, scores of cars responded to her name by blowing their horns.
welcome Paul!
I’m glad I caught the tail end of the Drive-In movies phenomenon in the 70s before they disappeared. I have many fond remembrances of them. When I’m driving around down here and see a huge lot of commercially zoned land for sale, I get the urge to buy it and open a Drive-In, since in FL the weather is usually always good.
5. Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie: This was the last one I saw at the Drive-Ins. My neighbor took my father, brothers and I for a men’s night at the movies. A Gary Busey movie was the second feature that I rightfully fell asleep during, and the title has been erased from my brain.
4. Dumbo: This was the first time I saw it.
3. The Island of Dr. Moreau: The Lancaster/Michael York version. My brother and I were suckers for the Planet of the Apes (still are) and we realized instantly that the make-up fx were none other than John Chambers’ and were jumping up and down in the backseat when we saw the first animal/human hybrid. They showed a bunch of Three Stooges shorts before the movie began. There was a swing set in front of the screen and all us kids were swinging away until the Stooges came on the screen. In my mind, I picture the playground scene from The Birds, when I think of how all us kids abandoned the swings and ran for the cars. And this night at the Drive-In was extra wicked awesome because it was part of a double feature shown with …
2. Star Wars: It wasn’t the first time I had seen it, but it was even greater seeing it at the Drive-In after watching Dr. Moreau.
1. Snoopy Come Home: This was the first Drive-In movie, or any movie I saw that I can remember. I was 3 and my father took my brother and I to see it. What makes this memorable is that I had to piss really bad and my father emptied his soda out the window for me to piss in, because he didn’t want to take me all the way to the restroom. With the motor skills and marksmanship of a 3 year old, I aimed at the cup but ended up pissing all over the windshield and dashboard.
A true ‘The Dad Abides’ moment!
Your dad should have taken a page from the Book of Mike Porvaznik, brought along a mayonnaise jar, instrumental in his never missing a minute of a drive-in feature and shaving 2-3 minutes off every trip between Warren and Erie.
It was one of those big ass concession stand soda cups. I don’t think an oil drum would have made a difference. Poor guy had to clean it up with a bunch of those tiny square napkins.
Hee! I love this story, Matt.
Hey, The Guns of Navarone at age 3. What can I say?
You were a hip kid as evidenced by your adult hipness.
Always been a hip shooter. Where do you get your hipness from?
What is it with coincidences and me today — listening to Tower of Power’s “What Is Hip?” as I flipped to this comment. Dang, too late to buy a lottery ticket. Eh, being a trailer park-less white male under the age of 70, not like I stood a chance anyway.
Hipness comes to a person when they decide to stop caring what others think.
Buy the lottery ticket next time, Eric. At least you can dream a little about what you’d do with the riches before the drawing. Then when you don’t win you can console yourself by not having to pay taxes on the winnings. Everyone wins when you play!
So you’re saying I can continue with urinating in public venues as long as I use my sloppiness to disregard what others think? Cool!
Eric, play my birth date next time in the lottery … 11/25/1968. This year it falls on Thanksgiving. I was brought home from the hospital on T’giving Day in ’68. Just give me 30% if you win.
It’ll be hard to top the movies I gloriously experienced at the drive-ins of NW PA/NE OH (RIP) and Kenosha’s still-functioning one — Swiss Family Robinson, Blade Runner (original cut, w/the preferred VO) and Braveheart (which, due to a murky fog coming in off Lake Michigan, made for the perfect “sensurround”) — but I’ll try …
The Warriors — preferably with people running through the cars yelling and screaming. So what if that’d get old quickly?
Tombstone — dust coming up off the parking lot gravel and dirt mandatory.
Zombieland — haven’t had as much fun watching a movie like this in a long time, and couldn’t shake the desire to be in a backseat the whole time.
Batman — Tim Burton version. Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure the obvious superior choice for this category, but me like-em this, too, for the same reasons I dug Blade Runner so much: dark and shadowy.
Grease — actually speaking from experience, but would be more fun now.
They should have sold Twinkies at the Zombieland showing. That would have been a great marketing tie-in.
Las Vegas still has a 5 screen drive-in. Sadly it’s in the middle of North Las Vegas, which is heavy street gang territory. I was there once in 1987 and haven’t been back since. I’m not into getting carjacked while eating popcorn!
Oh, I almost forgot. I saw “The Ten Commandments” for the first time at a drive-in in Nebraska when I was a kid. Epic!!! (Sorry for the lame pun!)
Did they supply hay for your horses fritz?
Where would you put the speaker…on the bridle?
You know, both of you, TCW and Floyd should learn to treat your elders with a bit of respect!!! However I do, most of the time, ask for what I get! So you’re both off the hook.
And in case it comes up…No that was not the original giving of the 10 Commandments in the wilderness. It was the remake with Charleton Heston. Yes…there was movie film when I was hatched!
Sorry, -fritz-. You know I love you.
Nothing to be sorry for, TCW. I set myself up for moments like these. I enjoy a good laugh too, now and then, and if I can’t laugh at myself, life would really create a huge vacuum! As long as I don’t have to wear Depends, I’m not old!!! And I don’t, so I’m not!
BTW, I just finished watching “Bad Day At Black Rock” on TCM. Good movie, which I happened to have seen at a drive-in years ago. I always love the scene when Spencer Tracy kicks Ernest Borgnine’s butt!
I watched it too, -fritz-. My first time seeing it and was impressed. For a long time I thought it was a western…I suppose it is a western in a way. That scene with Tracy as a man with one arm chopping Borgnine down to size was good!
Lets see I was really little going to Drive Ins and we did get to see The One Hundred and One Dalmations, and some other movies I can’t remember too well. The reason why I remember the Dalmations was that I came home and demanded to my Dad we get a Dalmation.He said no.
These were way before my time but there are a few I wouldn’t mind seeing at a drive in. Braveheart like others said would be cool, and a creepy intelligent horror movie. But it has to be the right car you know?
There was a Drive-In in Dorchester, MA next to the highway that we passed on the way to and from visiting relatives in East Boston, when I was a kid. We’d always leave at night after visiting them and my brothers and I would perch ourselves in the backseat facing the rear window to catch a three second glimpse of the movie. We were actually looking for nudie shots (which we were rewarded on occasion). I wish I could take every three second scene from all of those movies we glimpsed passing by, splice them together a la Cinema Paradiso, and leave the reel to my brothers when I croak.
I grew up just as the drive-ins in California were dying out, so I only got to see a few, but it was an unforgettable experience:
1. Red Heat. Sitting in the car with my family, watching Ah-nold and Jim Belushi wisecrack and take out Russian bad guys left and right. What more could a red-blooded American kid want? It played on a double bill with Iron Eagle 2, so we got to watch much Russian ass get kicked that night. And how!
2. The Sixth Sense. Over a decade after I thought I’d seen my last drive-in, me and some college buddies found a local drive-in that was showing Shyamalan’s masterpiece (on a double bill with the similarly-themed Stir of Echoes, also a good ghost story BTW) and we just had to check it out. I’d already seen Sixth Sense, but my friends hadn’t, so it was amusing to watch them react to the twists that I knew were coming (one of my friends’ girlfriend reacted to the big twist at the end by saying loudly, “son of a bitch!”).
1. The first movie I ever saw was “Around the World in 80 Days,” with David Niven and Shirley MacLaine, back around 1959.
2. Some Bob Hope movie about military life in the South Pacific. Had Jim Hutton and Phyllis Diller. Forget the name.
3. “Fitzwilly” with Dick Van Dyke. Not a very good comedy.
4. On this very day (or the night before) of the year, sometime in the 1970s, my friends and I celebrated my birthday by watching all three Clint Eastwood/Sergio Leone westerns in a triple feature. Had to work the next day. But we were young then.
5. When “The Outlaw Josey Wales” came out, I saw it 13 times by my own count, back when you had to pay for a ticket to see a movie. Caught it several times in drive-ins during that time of obsession.
I grew up behind the Ritchie Drive-In in Maryland. That’s not as much fun as it sounds, even to me. We say lots of movies at the drive-in. I can’t recall them all, but:
The Young Lions
Judgment at Nuremberg
The Longest Day
In Harm’s Way
Guns of Navarone
Cheyenne Autumn
Don’t Give Up the Ship
The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (my Mom talked us into going to that one by telling us they sang, “Knick Knack Paddywack” in it. That song was about 15 seconds of a 2 hour movie.)
Dad couldn’t stand hassles so if the drive-in was crowded we would leave before the movie ended to avoid the rush. We left The Guns of Navarone before the guns were blown up. Sheesh!