Oh, believe me, I know about the Encore Westerns channel.
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Seems you know what I meant! Saturday’s in the late ‘40s-early ‘50s meant going to the local theater with neighbor kids, buying a ticket for 10 cents and watching films from about 9am-5pm.
Always a serial, with a new episode each week. A Western or two with Tom Mix, Lash Larue, John Wayne, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, etc. Maybe a Ma and Pa Kettle. Cartoons. Bomba the Jungle Boy. .....The theater even held drawings for things like bikes and BB-guns.
It was really great for us kids (prior to having TV at home) to spend a whole day being entertained. ....It was ALSO great for the parents, as they knew they had the opportunity to create siblings for those of us at the theater! (The houses in my neighborhood were typically about 700-800 sqft.)
That era was before my time, but I did have a little neighborhood theater I used to go to, which stretched back to that period. Years later, I went to the library and went through the old newspapers on microfilm, and I documented all the Saturday matinee offerings that the theater screened, back before I was born... Roy Rogers, Bowery Boys, Tim Holt, Jungle Jim, Abbott and Costello, early sci-fi films, etc., and all the various serials that accompanied them. It was a fascinating endeavor.
I spent hundreds of hours, reading old newspapers. Going back a century’s worth of material. From headline stories to advertisements. Got such a taste of the mindset and mentality of America. Learned a heck of a lot more than I ever got from college history courses!