The first movie I ever saw in a theater was Star Wars. It was at the old Eastgate theater in Chattanooga, TN (which is now a YMCA building) and I was 4. My grandpa took me and my two older brothers to see it. I don’t actually remember the movie though - what I do remember is being cold in the theater.
Then next halloween, my brothers dressed up as Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. I got to be Princess Leia.
I believe mine was *Star Wars * as well. It was released when I was exactly three years and eleven months old. I saw it at the drive in, and I distinctly remember being scared out of my wits, not by Darth Vader or Sand People, but by the desert. Just all that nothingness completely freaked me out. I wound up turning around and watching the screen behind us, which was showing a later screening, and trying to tune out the sound.
I vaguely recall being scared by Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi.
More concretely, I remember crying when they blew up Number 5 in Short Circuit. It was just so sad the way the bad guys were playing with his his parts. sniff
Thank God it was just a decoy. Hooray!
My first movie memory involves going to the drive-in with my best friend when we were kids. I don’t know the year Star Wars came out, but I was born in '69 so you do the math.
I don’t remember a thing about Star Wars because we sat in the back of the van watching Bo Derek prance around in “10”. I’m guessing she was naked or nearly so because we were shocked and mesmerized at the sight of her. After that I begged to have my hair done just like hers, but mom wouldn’t have it.
My other early movie memory must have been before or after Star Wars. My dad took us to the drive-in to see “Groove Tube”. Why a small girl needed to be seeing that movie is beyond me, but I remember he kept trying to cover my eyes and I kept fighting him. The only thing from the movie I really recall is something about “sex olympics”.
At a theater? Hmmm. My clearest early memory is going to see a matinee of the Alaistair Sim Scrooge (1951) with my kindergarten day care class in what I guess was 1974 or 1975 – but that’s only because I remember holding hands with Mary Sprewell and being scared spitless by the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come and laughing at Scrooge falling out of bed.
I think my earliest memory is seeing Battle For The Planet of The Apes (1973) with my uncle in either 1973 or 1974.
My mother tells me that my first movie was Doctor Doolittle (1967), but I have only the vaguest memories of that (mainly of the big pink snail).
On the other hand, as a child I had persistent recurring dreams about a marionette show, and especially about a girl in a white dress dancing in a gazebo at night. I was shocked when I went to see a re-release of “The Sound of Music” when I was eight or nine and realized that I had been dreaming of the movie. I am convinced that I saw it when I was four and we were living in England – I can just summon up a memory of the outside of the theater – but my mother doesn’t remember taking me.
I also remember seeing a showing of Pollyanna at a summer kids’ program. I was shocked by the opening sequence, in which a naked boy (you can see his bare butt) jumps off a rope swing into a lake. The start of that movie always brings back that moment, and how embarrassed I felt.
Our father, in our station wagon dragged us kids to see a movie: the Snow Queen. I remember Art Linkletter introing the film. I remember falling asleep several times - the movie seemed to go on forever. I think they were showing it with Fantasia. I distinctly remember dancing hippos. Oh don’t look up Snow Queen. It’s the most boring cartoon ever made.
Weird, I have a near-identical story. My first movie memory is definitely from Candleshoe, and all I remember is the scene in which Jodie Foster’s character gets the clue from the big stained-glass window. I’ve seen it since then on the Disney channel, and parts of it (especially all of David Niven’s characters) seemed familiar, but my first true memory is of that window scene.
But I was 6 years old in 1977, and it seems like I would remember more than that if I were that old. I remember all of Pete’s Dragon, from the same year. But then again, I don’t remember seeing Star Wars for the first time at all; in fact, I remember being disappointed that we were seeing that when we could’ve seen Pete’s Dragon again.
I’m sure I’d seen other movies in a theater before then, especially Song of the South. My brother got an import version of that from Japan, and watching it was like going through regression hypnosis – the whole thing seemed so familiar, but I don’t have any “real” memories of seeing it the first time. Weird how that works.
One of two choices - it was probably The Sound of Music with the whole family, including grandparents, but it was in the cinemas for so long that I might have seen One Million Years B.C. with my mother before we got around to seeing TSOM.
I loved OMYBC - I ws already into dinosaurs and took my favourite toy with me (called Dino!) and thought I had lost him but another patron stepped on him as he was following out along the row and he was saved! I remember we sat in the middle of the front row of the circle and I was mesmerised for the whole film.
Dino was a free gift from a luckybag (some sweets, a joke and a cheap plastic toy in a bag which cost 3d back then) and, in fact, was actually a toy glyptodon and not a dinosaur! Weird choice of critter to turn into a toy for kids’ sweetie bags…
Most of my early childhood was spent in small Midwestern towns that didn’t have a theater. In 1959 we lived in Fayetteville Arkansas for a short time. A theater downtown offered a double-feature of horror flicks on Saturday afternoon. Admission was 10 cents – cheap enough that a kid could scour the streets and pick up five pop bottles, get the two cents each deposit, and buy a movie ticket.
In the theater, white kids sat downstairs and black kids had to sit in the balcony. The black kids would spit off the balcony. We thought it was funny and called the spit “chocolate milk”. My siblings and I had never lived around black people before, and I don’t know what the thoughts of the native Arkansas kids were, but we didn’t think about the segregation much at all – it was just the way things were. We didn’t see being relegated to the balcony as a bad thing – we would’ve preferred to sit there so we could spit on people.
I was 10, my brothers were 7 and 9. We were allowed to walk to the theater from home although it was at least a mile away.
Paint Your Wagon
It’s one that, like AHunter3 mentioned about Mary Poppins, I had fond memories (mammaries?) of as a youth but was sorely disappointed in after viewing it again as an adult.
I remember when I was 5, being bored silly, during Rosemary’s Baby. Then, when it got to the “sex scene”, (if you’re familiar with this movie, you know that it can’t really be described as a “sex scene”), my Mom called my Dad to come pick me up, while she and my older sister stayed to watch the movie. I was not pleased, and let the whole theatre know. It was the first indication that something interesting was going to happen in the movie, dammit. Years later, when I actually saw that scene, I was so disappointed.
I vaguely remember seeing parts of Bonnie and Clyde at the drive-in.