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Favorite summer movie memories
posted by
WayBackWhen2008
on
May 30, 2008 at 7:33 am
Anyone care to share their favorite summer movie experience as a child (between age 5 and age 11). One of mine was watching “Grease” with my crazy cousins in Crystal Lake, Illinois. I will always remember it as the “Summer of Grease”. And what about that “Whacky Shak”? What a blast from the past.
Maria
Comments (6)
Maria, 30 years later, the summer of 1978 is filled with great memories in the Hamptons, Long Island! Check out the commentary I wrote about it a week or so ago.
My family went to see GREASE in the theater six (6) times! Two of those times, we stayed in our seats to watch it a second time. You could do that back then with a problem. Today, it’s one of the few movie musicals I enjoy.
I believe that Friday June 13, 2008 will mark 30 years to the day that GREASE was released (Friday June 16, 1978). JAWS 2 was released on that same day, as well.
Summer movie memories:
The experience that I remember distinctly is back in the late 1950’s-early 1960’s, when my sister and I were both preteens, when my parents would pile everybody into the family lime-green Rambler station wagon, going out to dinner, and then to the Fresh Pond Drive-In, which was Right on Fresh Pond Pkwy, in Cambridge, MA. It was kind of a neat experience, seeing movies from a car, in blankets. A couple of movies I remember seeing at the Fresh Pond Drive-In were “The Time Machine” and “The Mouse That Roared” Cool films. Sure wish I could see West Side Story at a Drive-In cinema sometime.
I remember vaguely seeing a little of bit of Crazy Larry and Dirty Mary I think it was called. My dad would bring his cooler and snacks. He woould park by the playground so we kids could play while him and mom would watch the movies. My brothers would sit on top of car (since they were the older ones). We had fun.
During the summer of 1962, when I was due to enter the sixth grade in the fall, my sister and I attended day camp out west for six weeks, where weekly trips to see movies were a regular thing. I remember seeing films such as “The Music Man”, Merril’s Marauders, Bon Voyage, and a number of others. This was also the summer that I got introduced to the great musical West Side Story. One girl in the group that I was in received a copy of the LP album soundtrack of the original Broadway stage production of West Side Story for her birthday, brought it in and played it for the rest of the group. The kids would be singing all the songs from WSS on the bus, both to and from camp every day, and it was cool. I immediately fell in love with the music of WSS, although I didn’t see the movie
until it was several years out of date, and shortly before it went on TV; around Christmaastime of 1968, as a high school senior. I fell in love with the film instantly, and have been hooked on it since. heh.
The summer of 1963 was my all-time favorite summer of movies. So many films that became all-time favorites I saw that summer: Connery in “Dr. No,” Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” John Huston’s “The List of Adrian Messenger,” Charlton Heston in “55 Days at Peking,” Ray Harryhausen’s greatest achievement “Jason and the Argonauts,” and Harryhausen ripoff “Captain Sindbad,” the first “Beach Party” film, guilty favorite “King Kong Vs Godzilla,” little -remembered but excllnt film Rock Hudson and Rod Taylor in “A Gathering of Eagles.” and I believe I saw my favorite film (other than the Bonds) which hit my local theater that summer: Darryl F. Zanuck’s “The Longest Day.” I know I saw other films that summer and am probably leaving something out, but the summer of 1963 was it for me.
Come to think of it 1963 was a great year in general for movies. 2 of my other all-time favorites also premiered that year: Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in “Charade” McQueen in “The Great Escape” and one of my top 10 favorites “How the West Was Won.” What a year.