There are still a few of them around but it’s not the same. When I was young they were everywhere,  now it’s like searching for the Holy Grail in that there will be a rumor of one being open somewhere but when I make the trek there, I find out that it closed two years ago. In their heyday they were everywhere and even if the movies weren’t that good, it was fun. I’m sure part of the reason was that cable still hadn’t been invented and part of the reason was that there really wasn’t that much to do in the town I grew up in. In any case, for five or six bucks you could sneak a carload of kids into a double or triple feature and let the fun begin.

Everthing I ever knew about Kung Fu I learned from David Carradine and drive in movies.

• David Carradine because he stared in a television series called “Kung Fu.” (I never once questioned the fact that a Shaolin monk didn’t even look Chinese.)
• Drive ins because that’s where I saw every Chinese Kung Fu movie ever made. With all the seventies state of the art technology they figured out how to take a movie made in China, remove the sound track, and replace it with English. Hong Kong never figured out how to match the voices with the movement of the actors mouths however, but we just didn’t care.

To be honest, I would not trade satellite TV for every drive in left in America, but I do miss what it represented. A simpler time. Driving up, driving in, and moving from spot to spot, trying to find a speaker that worked properly. Looking around to see who all was there that you knew. And who was parked on the back row.

And waiting for it to get dark.

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