In general, I don’t get too caught up in drive-ins of the past or virtual drive-ins of the present. Carload is meant to celebrate and promote real, living drive-in theaters, where you can go to form real memories of snack bars, gravel parking lots, cool summer breezes, and movies under the stars. But I know that some of the visitors here can’t make it to a real drive-in as often as you’d like.

For the folks without a nearby drive-in, and for folks who want to remember what they were like 40-50 years ago, the best virtual drive-in experiences I’ve found are the Shocker Internet Drive-In series of videos hosted at the Internet Archive.

In the episode embedded here, the Shocker folks run an unusual double feature of two US movies that reused footage from the Soviet sci-fi movie Planeta Bur. Roger Corman went first with 1965’s Voyage To The Prehistoric Planet, followed here by the 1968 Peter Bogdanovich remake Voyage To The Planet Of Prehistoric Women. Add in a Droopy cartoon plus plenty of movie trailers and drive-in interstitials, and you’ve got three hours of nostalgia at the click of a mouse.

Most of the Shocker series are a little more gory or R-rated than I’d want to embed here, but this episode is pretty tame. To stream or download more of them, go to Archive.org and search for “Shocker Internet Drive-In”.

Finally, I ask you readers for help with two questions. Do you know of any other virtual drive-in sites or videos? And I’m also curious whatever happened to the folks who lovingly assembled these Shocker episodes; their web sites all appear to be dead now. If you know something, please share it with us by leaving a message. Thanks!