The Age of Innocence (and the End of It)

When I was a kid, back in the 70's, my father would occasionally take my mother, my sister and me to the drive-in.  We would load up the old Dodge Rambler station wagon with some snacks (my father was very frugal, there was NO WAY he was paying concession stand prices for stuff), some blankets and a couple of pillows for us kids in case we dozed off (which we usually did).

I can only remember a few of those movies.  One was a Sinbad movie (one of the old Ray Harryhausen special effects laden ones).  I can vividly remember a giant statue of a six-armed god coming to life with a sword in each hand, fighting Sinbad and his mates.  I have since watched it as an adult.  (It was The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, BTW).  I found that I remembered a few more things from that movie that I had forgotten.

One that I have absolutely no recollection of seeing in the drive-in was "Patton".  It was rated PG, and the PG was as much for the language as the violence.  My father was very straight-laced and did not cotton to having his young children hear such language.  I guess he never thought we might hear it as easily among our friends as on the big screen....

Anyway, flash forward a few years.  We, my sister and I, are still under the age of accountability when Star Wars came out.  I desperately wanted to see this movie, but it was PG, and my father was adamant that we were not going to be exposed to the language a PG movie might have.  But, yet, they had allowed me to obtain the movie  tie-in book.  I pointed out that I was reading the book and there wasn't a bad word in it.  It took some begging, but I finally got my folks to relent and let us see it.  Not at the drive-in, unfortunately, but a few years later, after I turned 18, the sequel came out, and they paired it with Star Wars, so I got to see both in a drive-in after all.

Quiggy