Fake news alert: My 2017 drive-in odyssey

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2017 Odyssey: Week One

Earlier this year as I assembled the list of active drive-ins in North America, I noticed that there were 329 in the US and 36 in Canada. (Since then, three more opened or re-opened in the US for a current total of 332, but I digress.) Adding 329 and 36 gives you 365. Does that number remind you of anything?

At that moment, I knew I needed to visit every active drive-in theater, one per day. The 2017 Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey would be an epic journey through cities and small towns, with short hops across farmland and long, desperate treks across deserts. There were only two obstacles to this plan: Money and time.

There’s an obvious way to overcome these hurdles. I’m going to fake it. Every day, I’ll post a dispatch from another drive-in, typically in another town. (There are just a few with more than one drive-in; that’ll help in reaching 368 theaters in 365 days.) I’ll tell you where I stayed overnight, and I’ll mention the best nearby restaurant. There will be a running total of mileage. The places and highways will be real, but my experiences will be completely fake, or as I would prefer to call it, virtual.

My goal would be to catch every drive-in on a night when it’s active, but that’s not realistic. Most are closed for several months a year, and some schedules are just weekends. I’m shooting for at least 200 movie nights, and I’ll keep track of how close I get to that target.

My odyssey will begin in Florida, then across the southern US to California, in an attempt to catch as many active showings as I can in January. I’ll begin at the southernmost drive-in, which I already know won’t be showing anything Jan. 1. Ironic!

Check in with me daily as we discover what this road trip would be like, if we only had the time and money to take it for real.

Remco Movieland – a surprisingly good toy?

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Front view of the Remco Movieland toy drive-in theaterA few years ago, I wrote about the Remco Movieland, a 1959 drive-in toy that didn’t look that much like the opening sequence of its TV advertisement. What I didn’t notice then was that Scott Santoro at the Retro Rockets blog had one of them to show off. According to the Santoro, the Movieland is not so bad. “I loved it anyway,” he wrote. “To me, it wasn’t just a toy, it was an experience.”

Santoro included a reference from my youth, the Give-A-Show Projector (profiled at Retroland), which had cardboard strips of six slides per story. He didn’t say how many images were in each Movieland feature, but “there were enough panels to convey the bare essentials of a story including a beginning, a middle and an end.” There’s a lot more information about exactly how the Movieland worked, with many helpful photos, so you really should go read it!

Screen shot from Remco Movieland TV ad

Looking at that ad again, I took a screen shot from the beginning and noticed more than I had when it flashed by in less than four seconds. For example, it really is the Remco toy at the top of the hill, and there’s a diagonal ramp up to the entrance and exit. But what’s that in front at the bottom of the hill, where the cars are parked? Is it a small strip mall with really shallow stores? Is it a farmer’s market with colorful posters? But I digress.

It turns out that there were enough Movieland toys sold that there’s usually one available on eBay. At this writing, pristine editions can run several hundred dollars, but the beat-up, pieces-missing result of a normal childhood is typically under a hundred, depending on condition. So if you really want one of your own, now you know where to buy it.

Muralist meliorates Mahoning

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Mural on drive-in buildingPennsylvania muralist Christian Egbert has a business plan that seems to work for everyone. Egbert paints a mural on a local business for just the cost of materials, and then gets commissions from some of the folks who are impressed when they see his work.

That’s a very quick summary of the entertaining story published today in the Reading Eagle. The part we care about appears halfway down the article. Egbert met someone from the Mahoning Drive-In at a flea market a few months ago, and the result was a gorgeous mural that covers the projection building there. It takes a few clicks in the slide show, but you can eventually see what a great match that artwork is for a night under the stars.

According to the Eagle, “The drive-in’s new owner, Jeff Mattox, covered the cost of the supplies, but Egbert donated his work. In exchange, the artist was given space to sell paintings at the drive-in.” For more details, you know you ought to go read it!