Category Archives: California

Project Drive-In roundup 4: The list that wouldn’t die

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In the third installment of our roundup of candidates for Honda’s Project Drive-In, I predicted that Honda would choose more than five lucky recipients of digital projectors. What I really didn’t anticipate was that Honda would reopen voting for the second set of winners.

With another round of voting comes another round of candidates that we haven’t mentioned so far, along with some (marked with an asterisk) who saw new stories about them after voting was extended. If you’re reading this, you’re already online, so go vote for your favorite!

* This drive-in was in a previous roundup, but a new story has been published about it after Honda extended voting for Project Drive-In.

Project Drive-In roundup 2, The Sequel

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In my last post, I began the task of listing every local media report of every local drive-in that’s participating in Honda’s Project Drive-In. Foolishly, I thought that I might gather up all of them in one sitting. When I hit 20 theaters, each with a similar tale of tenuous finance and this lottery-ticket hope for survival, my eyes had glazed over, and I barely had the strength to finish off the post and click Publish.

Two days later, I’m ready again to see how many more drive-in reports I can list. Again, they’re alphabetized by state. And again, if you click through and find a particularly cool detail we should all know about, please leave a comment.

More of your candidates:

Whew again! That’s 20 more drive-ins with local coverage of their Project Drive-In eligibility. I don’t know whether there are 20 more that I haven’t mentioned, but if I spot enough new ones, there may be a third episode of this franchise.

Two of three California drive-ins doing well

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Neon Sunset signKSBY, San Luis Obispo’s news leader, aired a fairly lengthy report about the state of several of its nearby drive-in theaters. I would have loved to embed it here, but the pre-roll commercial auto-starts and then the player never loads the actual video, so it’s in turn annoying and useless. I had to dig around to find one page where the news report actually plays. At least once, while I was there. But I digress.

Oddly, the story leads with the former Lompoc Valley Drive-In, now the Drive-In Recycling Center, though the faded screen/sign is still there. On the other hand, the HiWay in Santa Maria and the Sunset in San Luis Obispo are still going strong. “Both will convert to digital before the year is out,” the report says.

Although the video never loaded for me on the report’s text page, you can read more about it there. For a local station, it’s a pretty comprehensive look at regional drive-ins. Just don’t click the video links there, unless you’re luckier than me.