The Black Hole
Gremlins
Ghostbusters
Poltergiest 3
Rambo 3
Double Dragon
Alien 3
Highlander 3
Bound by Honor
StarTrek: Generations
Meucury Rising
Godzilla

To give you an idea of my age, I was in the 6th grade when I saw Gremlins. Sorry, I don’t see going to the movies a big thing anyways. I know that other people do, and they critisize me for not going, but it’s my money and I will choose what I will do to entertain myself.

I have no desire to:

1) pay the exhorbant prices that theaters charge to see a movie.
2) pay the exhorbant prices for refreshments.
3) sit in seats that are too small.
4) put up with people’s cell phones going off.
5) put up with rude and obnoxious people in the theater.
6) put up with the litter, bubblegum, and whatever else is making me stick to the floor.

Furthermore:

7) You can’t rewind a movie if you want to see a part again.
You can’t pause a movie if you need to use the restroom.
9) You can only see it once. If you rent it, you can see it as many times as you like within the rental period.
10) If you own the Tape/Disc, you can see it as many times as you want as long as the media lasts.
11) You can use your own drinks, food, and restroom facilities at home.
12) My Sony home theater system works pretty good. I can control the volume, the sound field, the DSP profile, speaker placement, etc. Theaters are way too loud and when I get out I’m half deaf.
13) I don’t have any desire to watch something on the big screen. My 27″ Sony does just fine.

Who whould have thought that the movie rentals would eventually lead to the demise of the movie theaters. Now I can go and view a movie without going to the theater. Pay $5 and I have it for a week on DVD. The only downside to this is that you have to wait for it to come out on DVD so you can rent it.

Now, get this: the matinee included: 3 (yes, three) “full length” features (cheap “B” movies, to be sure, but plenty of Roy Rogers, Hoppalong Cassidy, Jungle Jim, Bomba the Jungle Boy, Edward G. Robinson, Randolph Scott, James Cagney, Bob Hope, and other famous stars); the features were usually varied, to include one Cowboy, or Cowboys and Indians, one Exotic location film (Tarzan, a Hope-Crosby “Road” show, or Turban Bey), and one mainstream regular feature. But wait, that wasn’t all. We always had a Serial (Rocket Man or Flash Gordon, etc.), a newsreel (Pathe or Universal RKO), between three and five cartoons, selected short subjects, and previews of coming attractions.

Like the Dollar Movies, above, our nine-cent theatres bit the dust in the early 50s; but even when those two theatres closed, we had mainstream cinemas for a quarter, which had almost as much entertainment.

Seems like, back then, people weren’t out get rich off the poor folks and their kids, and Hollywood made movies because they LIKED making movies. And funny enough, I don’t remember any suspicious looking men hanging out in the balconies.

Ah, well, that was in a distant time, long before the RIAA and the MPAA. (Come to think of it, I wonder if that had anything to do with the emergence of those shadowy characters in the upper balconies…)

Plus what’s with this insane $20 a pop for a movie? A student ticket at my local theater costs $8 (Regular is $9). Say you’re going on a date, that’s $16 right there. Add in popcorn, and your costs rise to ~$20. Say you want to hit a nice dinner afterwards. There goes another $20-30. A date costs $50 nowadays. Now you see why people are forgoing the movies.

Every year or two, I would show up in this town on business and when I was on an overnighter, I would go take in a movie. The was a movie house in a city I shall not name. This movie house had been there for a long time and had a long term contract with those that delieved the movies to keep them coming at a very low price. It had been there so long it was called The Dollar Cinema. For three bucks, you could get your concessions and go watch a movie at a reasonable price. Know what happened to it?

Well since this was a fairly large city, the other cinemas in the malls and the like weren’t getting the lions share of movie goers. The Dollar Cinema was the place to go in that city to see a movie. The other higher priced movie houses weren’t getting the bucks. So they got together, made the owner an offer he couldn’t refuse and bought the place out. Raised prices and continued business? Not a chance. They closed the place down and bulldozed it over. Now those same people that used to go there have one game in town; the high priced cinemas.

There’s another victim of the high prices that is missing on the movie scene; The Movie Drive In. Along about the same time as the Saturday Night Matinee’s were popular so were drive in’s. Most had playgrounds for the kids right up front under the screen where people didn’t want to park their cars because they would be too close to the screen. The Drive In is another causality of times gone by. There are very few that exist today. On rare occasion I still see a screen in some backwoods place but for the most part they have go the way of the dodo.

Now if you see a movie it almost has to be in one of these high priced places. Like the mom and pop record store, the general publics viewing habits have changed. The businesses got greedy and one by one, the populace is deciding on their own that it isn’t an experience worth the money to go all the time to see.

Funny I haven’t even begun to address the quality, theme, viewer displeasure, or continual redundant remakes. Yet it seems once again, I have managed to fill this post with a rambling memory. Oh well, no one said that times gone past were better; only that they were different.