Popping a marshmallow into your mouth as you vacuum the floor does not make for a memorable moment. Roasting one with fellow hikers around a campfire after a challenging summit of an Adirondack Peak is an experience never to be forgotten.
While alone, I’ve watched many a movie in front of my laptop’s tiny screen. When interruptions from three phone calls, a knock on the door and insistent whine of a dog bent on getting outside, the memory of those movies passed through my mind as quickly as grass goes through a goose. However, I’m sure you remember those movies you watched when in the company of hundreds of other viewers, in a large theatre featuring an interesting display of related artifacts in the lobby.
My earliest memorable movie watching was that of Fighter Squadron, a 1948 film about an American unit based in England. Standing in the dark outside the Revue Theatre on Roncesvalles Ave., Toronto, holding the necessary coins in my 12-year-old trembling outstretched hand, I asked a passing couple, “Could you please buy my ticket for me?” With a knowing smile, they did. To my disappointment, the pilots did more womanizing than flying. My aircraft recognition skills weren’t as honed as they are today. The purported Messerschmitt Me-109s cavorting about the sky were actually American P-51 Mustangs embellished with some iron cross markings.
The 1955 movie Strategic Air Command was memorable for me:Imax photography in VistaVision, with color by Technicolor and Perspecta stereo sound! When the massive Convair B-36 Peacemaker bomber, with its six piston and four jet engines thundered across the super-wide screen, my seat trembled. When cigar-chomping crusty General Curtis Lemay arrogantly sauntered out of his aircraft on a surprise security inspection, an equally trembling young sentry tried to challenge him with, “S-Sir…, the plane might ex, exp..explode!”, Lemay sharply countered with, “M’boy, it would not dare!”
How’s this for really special effects: I went to Massena NY’s theatre to see the 1997 film Titanic. How appropriate: the first three rows of the theater were flooded by a plumbing failure (not an iceberg).
When only one of our three children were of school age, we took them to a drive-in in our 1973 VW Westfalia camper. We popped the top, they clambered up to the upper bunk and, down below, I made popcorn on our propane camping stove. The other vehicles in the back row were a-shaking too, but for a different reason.
Having the proper setting makes for memorable movie attending.
