Movies were a big part of my life growing up, and certainly why I’m
such a lover of them now, but there was something special about going to
movies when you were a kid, the magic on the screen was a real to you
as your parents were and mostly likely more interesting. To put some
context as to when I was a kid let’s just say I saw
Star Wars in theatres before it had
“A New Hope”
attached to it and a child’s admission price was about two dollars. At
that time going to a movie for me was a big deal, there was only one
theater in my town so the options were limited, and every week part of
my allowance was the two dollars required to go to the children’s
matinee at The Strand Theater ever Saturday afternoon.
This was before every home had a VCR and the only regular children’s programming available was either
Sesame Street or
Saturday morning cartoons,
while today kids have access to all kinds of shows aimed at them
through dozens of cable channels or their parent’s libraries of DVDs and
Blurays. When I was a kid if you wanted to watch
The Wizard of Oz
with Judy Garland you had to wait to Easter weekend for whatever
Network was airing it that year. That is why those Saturday afternoon
matinees were so important as not only was it getting us out of the
house, and away from our nosey parents, but it also allowed us to see a
plethora movies that we would otherwise most likely not see. It didn’t
matter if it was an old adventure film from the fifties because it was
new to us. When our parents dropped us off, with enough money for a
ticket, a large pop, licorice and Milk Duds, a whole amazing world
opened for us, and the people putting these matinees together really
made it an event. These matinees were a whole afternoon affair that
often included games and such before the houselights went down, and then
when those lights dimmed we would first be treated to a cartoon. It was
hear that I first was exposed to the hilarious antics of the Looney
Tunes gang and I’ve been a fan of them ever since.
We all wanted to grow up to be Bugs Bunny but most of us ended up being Daffy Duck.
After
the cartoon we’d then get a chapter from a serial from the 40s or 50s.
Each week we’d be able to see the latest installment in the adventures
of
Captain Marvel,
Zorro or
Flash Gordon, and
it certainly didn’t matter to us that they were in Black and White as
many of us didn’t even have colour televisions at home. These chapters
would all end in a nail-biting cliffhanger that would ensure we would be
in attendance next week, much as it did to those who saw those serials
when they were originally run.
Then
after the serial we’d finally get the movie we came to see, sometimes
two movies if we were lucky, and I can remember sitting surrounded by
hordes of likeminded kids as if it was yesterday, we laughed at the
antics of Kurt Russel’s Dexter Riley in
The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes or cheered as
Blackbeard’s Ghost
thwarted a bunch of gangsters who were trying to foreclose on a bunch
of old ladies, and even hide behind out mittens as the horrifying
Green Slime threatened to barbecue our hero.
It’s
amazing what scared you as a little kid and now looks absolutely
laughable, yet when you were in the darkened theater the dangers were
real even if it was just a guy in a terrible rubber suit. It didn’t
matter to us that the plot of movies such as
One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing
made little to no sense because gosh darn it we believed it. Sometimes I
am able to briefly recapture that feeling when I sit with my little
nephew and nieces as they get enraptured by one of these classics,
letting me see it through their eyes as I once did my own.
Of
course the multiplexes today show countless movies on Saturday
afternoons, they even set aside showings for mothers and their babies,
but the halcyon days of the Children’s Matinees I grew up with are long
gone. I guess it’s a more dangerous world now than when I was a kid,
spree shootings and terrorism certainly were not in our lexicon back in
the day, and our mom’s had no fear of dropping off their kids and
getting a break from us as well. I’m not saying times were better back
than, predators of all kinds have existed throughout history, but
something was lost when those theaters stopped bringing an afternoon of
magic to us kids.
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