Category Archives: Kansas

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 3: Dark of the screen

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I warned you that it might come to this. With less than a week left in Honda’s Project Drive-In voting period, I’ve found media reports about a few more of the candidates.

Here’s something confusing: Some of those media reports only partially duplicate other reports. That is, if a new story lists drive-ins A, B, and C, but a story from one of my first two round-ups already mentioned A and C, then I’ve added B as a new candidate in this third round-up. If you click through to the story, it’ll mention all three, but we know that B is the only one that’s new to this list. Okay?

With that in mind, let’s go through a few more:

And that should hold us on Project Drive-In news until they start talking about winners. Wouldn’t it be nice if Honda chose more than five?

Kansas Star Vu hopes Honda will bring it back to life

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Here’s a slightly different angle on Honda’s Project Drive-In promotion. Of the drive-in theaters on its ballot to receive a new digital projector, almost all of them are still operating. Here’s a story about the Star Vu (El Dorado KS), which pretty much closed last year but hopes to reopen if it can be one of Honda’s winners.

The report from KAKE, Wichita’s News Leader, says it all. The Star Vu folks report that fundraising has been slow, with only about $2000 contributed toward the conversion effort. The theater shows films once in a while on special benefit nights; I think they’d be smart to book more classic films to bring in more cash at the box office and concession stand, and to remind patrons what they’ll be missing if the Star Vu can’t turn the corner.

Of course, we love the opportunity to get more video of drive-ins are they are today, even when they’re sort of closed. KAKE’s article that accompanies the video report isn’t just a transcription, so you might want to go read it!