What, exactly, is the appeal of going to a drive-in movie?

Cafe Society
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It never ocurred to me that someone might wonder what the appeal of drive-ins were, but if you didn’t really grow up with them I could see why someone would ask. I didn’t really grow up with them, and the only time I can recall going to one was around 1981-82 when we went to see Clash of the Titans and I kept staring at another screen where Alien was playing.

To the OP, I understand why you don’t see the appeal, we’ve had it so good for a long time. I wondering in a few decades whether people will ask, “Why did people go to movie theaters to watch movies?”

102

They wrote a song about that!

The movie wasn’t so hot
It didn’t have much of a plot
We fell asleep, our goose is cooked
Our reputation is shot

Wake up, little Susie
Wake up, little Susie

Well, what are we gonna tell your mama?
What are we gonna tell your pa?
What are we gonna tell our friends when they say “Ooh, la, la”?

“Wake Up Little Susie”, by The Everly Brothers

103

Or as The Beach Boys say,

  • If you say you watch the movie you’re a couple o’ liars
    And “remember only you can prevent forest fires”
    Down at the drive in*
104

I thought maybe the US would have been taken over by the Russians and Cubans… :hushed:

105

Speaking of kid-unfriendly movies, I recall one time when my aunt and uncle took me with them to the drive in–they lived next door to us and I’m not sure why they were babysitting just me at the time rather than my sisters as well, but I might have not been feeling well. Anyway, I would have been younger than seven since we moved away from Sacramento circa summer of '66 or so, and I was mostly asleep in the back seat but woke up during the craziest damned scene EVER, very acid trippy and lots of fast cuts, violent imagery, the movie was in color and my recollection is of something having to do with all this representing the inside of a crazy person’s mind. I’ve never been able to track down what movie this might have been or even if I was just running a fever and not comprehending what I was seeing. It’s a very vivid memory though!

106

The first thing I thought of was the ending of 2001, but that would have been later than 1966.

107

Also not crazy enough. Think like if Un Chien Andalou were in color. More like that.

108

Too early for Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, which came out in 1971. I was wondering if the boat-in-the-tunnel scene might have combined oddly with an unwell viewer.

109

I have gone as far as combing through IMDB trying to find ANY movie of that general time frame that could possibly be the one I saw–it’s possible it was a foreign movie, my aunt and uncle were odd enough to have gone to see one but it’s hard to imagine a '60s era drive in theater in cowtown Sacramento actually showing one. Nothing really comes close–and I’m a horror movie aficionado and any of those “best horror” clip style shows that come up I watch but have never seen anything that matches. Maybe some sort of spy flick then, with a torture scene? I dunno!

110

Try this list:

111

I have had a movie memory for my entire life of a scene or ending of a movie from when I was 4-5 in the mid 70s. The scene shows a lady putting a combination lock on the bathroom door, and inside a man was complaining about a leaky pipe. Then he couldn’t get the door open because of the lock and the room fills with water from the leak and the man drowns. I have no idea if this is real or a dream, it was the second movie and I was asleep until this part I saw when I woke up.

112

Well, there goes MY night! :smiley:

113

Cheer up. Maybe it wasn’t released in 1966. :smiley:

114

If you saw it at the drive-in summer of '66, it would likely have been released in '65.

115

I used to go to drive in movies and what I liked about it was that you had the whole car to yourself or with anyone you went with. There wasn’t anyone tall sitting in front of you to block your view or next to you making noise. Plus you could recline your chair and overall be more private in your own car.

116

So I did some research on Wikipedia. Drive ins were actually first invented way back before WWII. Their peak in the 50s and 60s seemed to coincide with the larger trends of mass suburbanization and widespread adoption of car culture. IOW the “appeal” of the drive in was it was one more thing to do with that magnificent invention, the automobile.

Plus they were cheaper to operate than an indoor theater.

I vaguely remember seeing Star Wars in a drive in with my family when it first came out. So I can see the appeal of plopping the kids in the back of the station wagon with their blankets and pillows and whatnot.

117

My best friend and I did a lot of car (Truck) camping. We’d do it out of the blue. We where always ready to go.

On time we went camping and it was still quite early after we had made camp a fire etc. We got bored (as I said we did this a lot).

One of us said “Wanna go see a movie?”

We broke camp, and went to a drive-in. We saw Airplane! Best camping trip ever.

118

My personal memories:

I was a kid at the tail-end of the drive-in, born in 1967, so I never went much with just friends-- there was always an adult driver.

The most salient points I can think of, though, is that cars used to be a lot bigger, and theaters used to be cramped like the coach seating on airplanes-- and sold out, or close to it, even for films that had been there a while.

OMG, were drive-ins more comfortable than theaters.

And don’t forget, there were tons of convertibles still on the road then. You didn’t watch through the windshield, you watched over it. If you weren’t in a convertible, but were a literal kid, under about 12, your parents would let you sit on the hood of the car.

People talked, kids and teens ran and walked around, and no one cared much.

No one cared about tinny mono sound, either, because the sound in theaters was Dolby digital Surround Sound, not even close. It wasn’t always even stereo, and even if it was available, not all theaters could reproduce it.

Several things killed off the drive-in, it wasn’t just one thing, but they all munched at different aspects. One was the vast improvement of sound in theaters; another was cars getting a lot smaller, plus seatbelt laws, so you couldn’t go to the drive-in with six minors in the back of a pick-up, or the rear seat of a convertible with two seatbelts; another was home video-- VCRs, then DVDs, then streaming services-- many of the things drive-ins afforded: bring the kids, go to the bathroom without bothering everyone in your row, talk to the person with you, stretch out-- you could now do in your own home. And drive-ins tended to be on the edge of town, where land and property taxes were cheaper, so it was a longer shlep then the video store.

Yeah, they were revived during the pandemic, for the reasons others have posted above, and didn’t outlast it, for the objections raised by the OP.

There might be some walk-through history aspect of going to a drive-in for young people, for whom churning your own butter, and operating a record player are equal curiosities. And I suspect for people born before the Bicentennial, there might be a bit of nostalgia that would draw us to a drive-in once every decade, especially if it showed something we might have seen originally in a drive-in. Not me personally, but some people. When I’m feeling nostalgic, I get a Tootsie pop.

119

Then you should know how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.

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