Dumb question about Looney Tunes

[MNDude]

When I was a kid, I loved to wake up Saturday morning to watch The Bugs Bunny Roadrunner hour. I bought the Looney Tunes golden collection which should contain most of the episodes, and it is money well spent. Those episodes never get old.

But I was wondering, is there anyone here old enough to remember how they were originally broadcast back in the 40s and 50s? I doubt they had Saturday morning cartoon lineups back then. Did you have to go to the movie theaters to watch them or what?

[rlmorel]

Ah yes. I loved the Drive In, I still go once every few years. (forgive me-I know this thread is about Looney Tunes...:) It just got my mind to wandering...

Back in the Seventies, my parents had a Finnish exchange student who stayed at our house. Very nice, very smart, and became one of our family.

The last time she visited before my mother passed on, I dropped by during the visit to say hello, and met her young son who may have been ten or twelve.

She said that she was trying to think of something completely American to have him see or experience, the light bulb went on in my head, and I said "I have just the thing!"

Drive in Movie.

So, we looked to see what was playing (there were two screens, two movies at each one!) One of the main features was "The Simpson's Movie" and with no hesitation, they both chose that one! Heh, now THAT'S where people around the world get their impressions of America!

They were both delighted with the whole experience. The only thing missing was the speakers you used to have to put on the car window...:) (Having it on the car radio IS an improvement, however! But for nostalgic purposes...

I love Drive In's. The bad, bad fried food and the smell from the Snack Bar...all the stale looking commercials for local businesses, intertwined with the absolutely tacky, immortal, and delightful cartoons imploring you to visit the Snack Bar!

And while they were showing those, they often had a small playground right up underneath the screen with kids. The sun has just gone down...there is still light, and you can hear the kids and see the swings going back and forth, occasionally punctuated by the headlights of cars on the screen and they enter on their way to a parking space to view the movie from.

Then, when I was a teenager and young adult, going to the Drive-In, hiding kids in the trunk, setting out the old aluminum yard chairs with the green and white plastic webbing...

Boy, that makes me very nostalgic. Those were good times.

[GOPJ]

Wonderful memories rlmorel - thanks for sharing....

[rlmorel]

Thanks...it really hit a tuning fork in my memory there. Right now, I am laying in my hammock, the sun has just gone down...right around that time...:)

Love it!

[mass55th]

We didn’t have a car when I was growing up, so I never experienced the drive-in until I was much older and married. The last drive-in theater here was demolished about 4-5 years ago. The land was sold to a car dealership. Me and my youngest son who was in his early 40’s at the time would go there. They had two screens. One was for kids movies, and the other for those who wanted to see the current movies. Sometimes they’d have double-features, or triple features.

[abb]

Ha! Last month we were at DisneyWorld and had lunch here. Clips from scifi movies, cartoons, etc. Great flashback for me.

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g34515-d491910-Reviews-Sci_Fi_Dine_In_Theater-Orlando_Florida.html

Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater

One of the movies I can recall vividly seeing at our local drive-in was The Longest Day.

[21twelve]

https://www.cpr.org/classical/blog/composer-behind-bugs-bunny-introduced-generation-classical-music

And classical music as well. Carl Stalling used a 50 piece orchestra and turned out on average one score each week for the cartoons.

[sparklite2]

I would take my wife and infant son to the drive-in
in Atlanta for such shows as “Prison Women in Chains.”
My wife put up with a lot. LOL

[MNDude]

It includes a lot of black and white. They’re not very good though.

[rlmorel]

Yeah...it is harder to find them, no doubt.

I remember going to see movies like “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, “Batman” (from the Sixties) and we were all wearing pajamas in the back of a rust colored 1961 Plymouth Station Wagon. My dad drove, my mom made a couple of paper shopping bags full of popcorn, and we had all the blankets in the back...:)

America.

[Big Red Badger]

Engineer Bill,,,,
Did he have a Gimmick
For Drinking Milk by
The “Red Light,Green Light”
on his Set?
That memory has Haunted
Me For Years!

[Bonemaker]

You nailed it! A lot of us could write similar stories.

[dynachrome]

‘coal black”

the internet has it all (not a very crisp copy)

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1pyaz

[sparklite2]

Some of that stuff was intolerable. The frame would remain the same while dialogue was limited to lips movement. The whole damned show might only have half a dozen scenes.

[Texicanus]

I’m an old fart and remember when our family bought our first TV around the Fall of 1951, a Philco entertainment center with a 17 inch TV (leading edge stuff back then).

We received one station (signon = 10AM / signoff = 10 PM). Every thing was broadcast live except old (by standards of the day), Felix the Cat and Betty Boop cartoons, and other crap that no one would pay to see.

But kids and some adults would watch the TV from sunup to sundown fascinated by what was being broadcasting into their homes. It was like going to the theaters for free. Some people would turn on their TV’s just to watch the snow or search for new channels.

Being dumb, we kids (baby boomers) wondered why the “good cartoons” we saw at the theaters never got shown on TV at home during the fifties. Some did during the sixties, (in color no less) but we were grown up and fixing to head for Vietnam or become peace protesters (flower children) by then. Your generation got to see the “good” stuff on Saturday mornings. We got “Good Morning Vietnam” and no cartoons.

I do not wish to offend any friends of Felix the Cat and Betty Boop cartoons, but they can hide them away forever and I won’t miss them. These cartoons were so bad I was driven to find other interests. Thank you GOD for MAD magazine, action hero comic books, Rod Serling, Leo Fender, and “ham” radio. And finally thanks for Rocky and Bullwinkle, Roadrunner and Coyote, and other intelligible gibberish of that era.

[Fiji Hill]

We frequented our local drive-ins—especially after we acquired a 1958 Edsel Villager station wagon that would allow the kids to sleep while the parents could watch a movie without having to hire a baby sitter.

Before the show, those with spotlights on their cars would shine the lights at the screen. We had a spotlight on our ‘46 De Soto and our ‘49 Ford.

Movies that I saw at the drive-in included “Oklahoma!” “Bell, Book & Candle,” “The Littlest Hobo,” “The Son of Robin Hood,” “The Diary of Anne Frank,” “South Pacific” and “Bambi.” One of the last films I saw in a drive-in was “Bonnie & Clyde,” which I saw in the fall of 1969.

[centurion316]

In the mid fifties, Topeka had only two stations: CBS and NBC. Both stations would begin with a Test Pattern which we would watch on Saturdays until programming start. They showed old movie shorts: cartoons, Three Stooges, Little Rascals, serials and that stuff. Later in the day, before the weekly baseball game, they would show made for TV programs, Westerns, adventure. By the sixties, color TV began to emerge and TV cartoon series appeared. Roadrunner was one of those, along with Clutch Cargo, Yogi, Flintstones, etc. Except for Roadrunner and Bulwinkle, the new stuff did not stand up for the studio movie shorts.

Kids ruled on Saturdays.

[rlmorel]

OMG...that’s hilarious! “Prison Women in Chains”

Heh, when my dad got orders back to the states in the early Seventies, he took us on a trip through Europe, and by the time we got to Munich where our plane was departing from, my mom was sick so she made him take all six of us kids (ranging from seventeen to nine) out for a walk.

Hehehe...my dad walked us through the red light district of Munich which was not far from our hotel, apparently if you walked in the “wrong” direction! I remember seeing the windows with scantily clad women in them holding little dogs and such...at least that is how I remember it. Granted, we had just left Subic Bay that had Olongapo City there, and that was pretty explicit as I recall.

My mom was furious!

When we were in Italy on that trip, I can’t remember which city, might have been Rome since my dad had to go to the Embassy for something...so my mom had to take all of us kids out to shop or tour...I just remember walking around.

My mom, who was an attractive young Navy wife (with six kids!) could really doll herself up when she and my dad went to functions, so it was not like her to skimp on her appearance when she went out anywhere.

On this day, she had her hair up on top of her head, was dressed in black capri pants, black sweater, finished off with classic Jackie-O black sunglasses.

My mom was getting unbelievably cat-called. There were Italian guys grinning at her, making clicking noises with their mouths, calling out things in Italian, while the six of us trailed behind her like ducklings.

Hahaha...she was angry at my dad for leaving us with her that day, IIRC, and she was furious at getting catcalled like that.

What she found out later is that a young, attractive woman dressed in black being seen in public with six kids had a meaning in Italy she didn’t comprehend!

[V K Lee]

Prime property prices rising, and Daylight Savings Time. Both were the demons which killed Drive In Theaters. Where did they plan to store those many speakers?

Last Drive In Movie seen - “Clash of the Titans” (1981) with Burgess Meredith
Like the rotary phone, drive in movies have disappeared.

[HartleyMBaldwin]

Oh, I figured it was still out there on the internet somewhere, just not sure about Youtube and not curious enough to go looking.

[D_Idaho]

A guy on YouTube, 8thManDVD, has a great collection of Looney Toons, Popeye, Betty Boop, etc., all in HD, some in 4K. Worth a look if you’re a fan.