Ahh, movie theaters. The lights go down, the sound comes up, someone in the audience shrieks as their date spills their soft drink all over their lap. All in a row, the fans stand up and join hands. They sing along to the studio fanfare, eyes closed in ecstasy, not missing a note. DUN DADADUN! Such a public display of fervor can only mean one thing.
It's movie time.
Movie theaters! The birthplace of popcorn. The gasps, the laughs, the slurps of teenagers' tongues attacking each other mere inches away from your ear. The theater is how movies were meant to be seen. And there's really nothing else like it.
Come, paint a picture in your mind with me for a moment. It's 8:15 AM on a rainy Saturday. You walk into the theater with a group of friends from the Way-Too-Early Movie Club, popcorn in hand. You pick a row of seats, not so close that you burn your nose on the white-hot screen but not so far that you won't be able to make out any of the actors' nipples through their shirts. Laughing, you sit down and search for gum stuck to the bottom of your seat. Mmm, spearmint! Your favorite. It's going to be a good two hours.
Milk Duds!
From the instant you step into a movie theater, you know that you're in for a transportive, emotionally compelling journey during which you will be arrested if you go to the bathroom. Whether you're catching the latest installment of the Angry Pistons franchise starring Dan Ethanol and Pain “The Truck” Truckson, or just taking in a screening of an old French film where everyone is a bicycle, the siren song of the darkened movie house calls to us all.
Ohh, movie theaters. The lights go down, the lights come up, the lights go down again, the lights come back up. Something is wrong with the lights. The manager trudges to the booth to check out the problem.
Junior Mints!
Movie theaters! The crunch of popcorn, the slosh of soft drink, the giggles of the prankster down below tying all 65 audience members' shoelaces together into one enormous knot. All the great directors believed in the movie-going experience: Chunder Wexler, Amelia Arp, Wrench Jagarian. Each was executed for loving movie theaters too much. It was a different time!
The first movie theater was opened in Chicago in 1733 by a man named Shirl Grancherson. It was a wondrous occasion. At the premiere, the audience was so startled to see a lifelike cow on the screen in front of them that they rushed up front and tried to milk it. They didn't realize it was only a movie picture, or that milking cows wouldn't be invented for another 150 years. Such is the magic of the silver screen!
Ooh, movie theaters. The lights go down. The lights keep going down. You begin to dissociate in the darkness. Is any of this real? Are you real? Am I real? Who's to say? That's cinema, baby.
Sour Patch Kids!
Today, there are so many types of movie theaters that it's hard to keep track. Drive-ins: good god! The smell of gasoline, the rumbling of engines, the instinctual honking your car emits when it sees another car on screen. IMAX: oh lord! The gigantic screen, the thunderous surround sound, the booing of the crowd when a character on screen says a bad word. 3D: alack and alas! No one has ever been to a 3D movie, but rumors persist nonetheless.
And what does the future hold for movie theaters? Our finest scientists can only guess. Cup holders made entirely of silicon? Goggles that make it look like everyone on screen is naked? Increasingly terrible flavors of popcorn? There are so many exciting places movie theaters can go.
But one thing is certain, however: movie theaters will always be the only place where you can watch a movie. For this, we thank them, and raise our smuggled-in light beers in toast to their unique majesty. To cinema! To popcorn! To the place where silver screen dreams come true!
And that's a wrap!
Raisinets!