Don’t remember most of the movies I saw at the drive-in as a kid. I do remember dad taking me and my brothers to see Von Ryan’s Express, he must have really wanted to see it himself. I’m not sure but we may have seen Herbie the Love Bug at the drive-in also. Later on we had a drive-in not far away and I ended up working at the refreshment stand for a while. It was all family entertainment initially but the appeal of drive-ins was dwindling and eventually they began showing R and X rated movies late at night.
I don’t think I ever saw a drive-in movie in my hometown. The only one I can remember going to was during a California vacation: we saw “Cloak & Dagger” and “Red Dawn” at a drive-in in Escondido.
Used to go as a teen in Anchorage. The Billiken Drive-in was the only one in the city and was always busy even though they only showed B-movies. In the 70s, when I was in Socal in the military, I took my kids to see some Disney movie at a drive-in.
When I was 11, My Mom and Dad and I went to see Pretty Maids All in a Row.
Ummm. Very uncomfortable for all of us I suppose. In one scene, Rock Hudson feels up Angie Dickenson.
Another time, my best friend and I decided at the spur of the moment to go camping. We did that a lot.
Sitting at the campsite in mid afternoon, we decided to break camp before nightfall and go see a movie. Camping was sort of a been there, done that sort of thing. We got bored I suppose.
We drove back to Denver and saw Airplane! at a drive in. Neither of us really knew anything about the movie. But we share the same sense of humor. We where in awe.
The Angry Red Planet
Sample of the synopsis:
After MR-1 reaches Mars and its crew explores the planet’s surface, Dr. Ryan is attacked by a carnivorous plant, which Chief Warrant Officer Jacobs kills with his freeze-ray, which he calls “Cleo”. The crew then encounters an immense bat-rat-spider-crab creature, at first mistaking its legs for trees. That creature is also blinded and repelled by Jacobs who, again, uses his ray gun. When the crew returns to their ship, they realize that their radio signals are being blocked and the MR-1 is unable to leave Mars due to a mysterious force field.
O’Bannion next leads the crew to a Martian lake, where a city with high, impressive structures is visible on the other side, far in the distance. Crossing the water in an inflatable raft, they are stopped by a giant amoeba-like creature with a single spinning eye.
Even as a 9-year old I was highly unimpressed by that eye.
There was a Pittsburgh drive in back in the day called Dependable IIRC, which showed only X rated films (I think nowadays they’d be hard-R movies).
When I was 16, a buddy had his dad’s car and four of us went to the drive in. Minutes after parking, the driver noticed his neighbors in a car nearby (the drive in was near the Pittsburgh Airport, an hour drive away for us).
We tried convincing our driver that his neighbors would be just as embarrassed to be recognized, but 5 minutes into the film we had to leave.
I’m stretching the definition of “kid” here, but a memorable experience for me, Mrs. J. and our guinea pig Eno was the time we went to see “White Line Fever” and the original “The HIlls Have Eyes” at the drive-in in Lambs’ Grove, Iowa.
Went to a drive-in once, my brother and 2 cousins stuffed in the trunk of my Ford Falcon. The guy at the ticket booth gave me the stink eye, a guy going to a movie by himself with his spare tire on the back seat. Before I opened the trunk to let them out, I sped over some of the humps. Hearing them holler as they bounced around the trunk was pretty funny at the time.
When my folks were living in Abingdon, Virginia circa the mid-70s there was a drive-in there – the aptly named Twin Moons Drive-in – that showed X-rated movies. There were plywood barricades between the car slots to discourage looking at your neighbors.
I did not sample any of the films to see how hard they might be.
I have a long history with drive-ins. As a very small child, my parents took me to drive-ins several times to watch movies like ‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks’ or ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’. I remember one local drive-in had a playground with a real tank you could climb on and even get inside. As a kid it was a big outing. Coming home I’d stretch out in the back and sleep during the ride home. Child traffic safety was a wee bit more casual back then!
One by one the drive-ins of my youth were torn down, but a couple remained when I got to dating age. When I was on a double-date we did the ‘one couple hides in the trunk’ thing. I missed the turn-in to the drive-in and had to drive aways down the boulevard until I found a turnaround, all the while hoping my exhaust system didn’t have any leaks getting into the trunk! They were fine.
When I had my first serious girlfriend, since we both still lived with our parents, we would often go to the last remaining drive-in in the area to make out. We must have gone to the same movie a dozen or more times, which didn’t matter at all because we weren’t there for the movie 
. We even went in the middle of winter because that drive-in had a little electric heater along with the speaker so your car stayed nice and warm without having to run the engine.
Finally, as a parent with young kids maybe a dozen or so years ago we took them to a makeshift drive-in a couple times- a parking lot with a screen set up to project the movie on. You’d tune in the sound on a radio station.
I remember a number of drive-ins visible from the street showing R and X rated movies. Not quite the same as you may think of them now, Midnight Cowboy was originally rated X and I remember driving past a theater somewhere in NJ where you could see it on the screen, although only briefly unless you stopped. The movie was later re-rated as R. Also in PA when we first moved there we had to stay at a Holiday Inn overnight before we could get in the new house. From the parking lot of the hotel you could see the screen showing The Owl and the Pussycat right next door. That movie was rated R but I belief there was no actual nudity in it.
The drive-in I worked at was showing real soft-core porn stuff like the .The Young Nurses and a couple of cheerleader movies. They only played these after 10PM but they were readily visible from the street and nearby empty parking lots. About 10 miles away off the beaten path there was a theater only showing porn on weekend nights. That one had the back of the screen facing the road so nothing to see there…
I’m one year older than you and I’ve never been to one either. My wife found one in Baltimore a few years back that she went to a couple of times with friends, but I never went with.
My folks weren’t ones for drive ins, so the only time I’d get to go was with the neighbors. They tended to see the B-flick shows. I have memories of a bunch of R-rated B movies that are long on violence and nudity and short on plot and coherence,.
Two I remember (probably a double feature!) were Race With the Devil and Angels Hard As They Come. I must have been about 14. While being impressionable age, I didn’t become a Corman fan.
When I was a kid in the 70s, we would often go to a drive-in movie for the 4th of July, because they would have a fireworks display between the two movies.
I don’t remember which movies we saw, other than The Villain (featuring a young Arnold Schwarzenegger). Although my parents tell me they took me to Rosemary’s Baby (IIRC) when I was a baby, assuming I’d sleep through it.
Crazy things? Oh, you mean on the screen…
I’m 41 and have been to only one drive-in movie: the original Jurassic Park. The drive-in theater shut down a few years later and today is just an empty field, although the ticket booth is still semi-standing. The screen was torn down years ago.
I’m 57; when I was a little kid (early 1970s), we went, as a family, to the drive-in a few times. My parents would put my sister and me in our pajamas before we left the house, with the intent that the kids would fall asleep in the back seat during the (boring to us) main feature.
Prior to the main feature, I remember seeing Pink Panther cartoons; the one feature that I specifically remember us going to see was a comedy called “A New Leaf,” with Walter Matthau and Elaine May (though I don’t remember much about it).
The one and only time I went to a drive in was when a neighbor took a bunch of us to see Superman 2. It was a huge van and in those days the sound all came from a CB looking speaker you hung on your window so I hardly heard a thing but the movie was still awesome for little kid me.
Mosquitos were terrible so you could buy a window ac unit that hung on your window like the speaker did. Ineffective iirc.
US1 drive-in had the most screens. Saw most of the Planet of the Apes movies there I remember Rosemarys Baby and Audrey Rose, Jeremiah Johnson and Herbie movies.
Playgrounds were filled with broken glass and rusty swings.
We liked to sit on the hood with blankets, lots of musical chairs going on in the car. Everybody honked their horns when the credits rolled.
When I was a kid, there was a drive-in not far from my house that showed pretty hard-core porn X-movies on a huge screen. A highway wrapped ~2/3’s of the way around the screen allowing for an extended view. My dad used to drive around it very fast when I was in the car so I wouldn’t see too much dirty action. I imagine he drove much slower when I wasn’t in the car. 