Drive-in doesn’t mean drive into marquee

damaged 99W marqueeKPTV, Portland OR’s news leader, reported how a car drove into the marquee of the 99W Drive-In in Newberg. Not only does the report include some video of the theater as it looks today, but KPTV also included a bit of home movies from the 99W’s construction 50 years ago. You really should check out the video.

The 99W is still facing the expense of the transition to digital projection, and KPTV’s report makes it sound like they’ll try to raise money while operating with film for one more year. Now they’ve got to fix the sign too, but one would hope that somebody’s insurance will cover that.

KOIN, yet another news leader in Portland, added a short slide show of the incident. Normally, I’d also link to the drive-in’s page, but I’m not sure whether to choose the official company web site, which has some great recent and old photos in its gallery, or the Friends of the 99W Facebook page, which is where the tilted marquee photo was first posted. So I guess I’ll mention both.

Drag racing during intermission is a bad idea

Sunset Drive-In in Ahmedabad

The Sunset Drive-In in Ahmedabad, photo by Chobist

According to The Times of India, a couple of drivers in Ahmedabad got into trouble Saturday night by racing their cars during the intermission at a drive-in. Not racing their motors, racing each other. The story doesn’t name the theater, but it was probably the Sunset Drive-In Cinema there. (That theater’s index page suggests that its “auditorium” looks amazingly like a classic 1958 Life magazine photo of a Utah drive-in. But I digress.)

According to Chobist, the Flickr contributor who took the photo that’s next to these words, the Sunset opened in 1973 and is “one of the most popular hang-outs in the city.” It claims to have the largest screen in Asia, and it holds over 600 cars, plus a covered “sitting facility” for the carless.

Back to the Times story. The security officer working at the theater said that the two drivers started racing during intermission. “Soon, other spectators gave way to the car drivers for safety as the drivers were determined to perform stunts.” Five minutes later, one of the cars overturned, one car rammed another (kind of fuzzy on whether those two events were related), and other theater patrons then beat up the two occupants of the ramming car before handing them over to police. Sounds like another night where the in-car entertainment was even better than the movie. Whew!

 

Please add your photos to our Flickr pool

old Valley Drive-In in Fort Morgan, Colorado

photo by Neon Michael

Carload.com, America’s finest drive-in news source, has started its own Flickr pool to collect great (and just okay) photos of drive-ins. To get things started, I’ve added a few pictures of my own, such as this shot of the old Valley Drive-In in Fort Morgan, Colorado.

If you’ve got some drive-in photos, please join the Carload group and share them with the rest of Carload’s readers. If we use your photo to illustrate a story, we’ll give you credit and link back to your photo’s Flickr page, as demonstrated by the caption under this Valley photo. You retain all your rights to your photos; you’d just be giving Carload permission to use them here.

Please consider adding your drive-in experience to our collective celebration of all the great fun of drive-ins by uploading to the Carload group today. And thanks for visiting Carload.com.