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Let’s play.

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Stop groaning, this one is easy.

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I’m sure I must have seen other movies before this one… we had a lovely old fashioned theater in my hometown complete with velvet covered balcony seating… and I’m sure my mother took me to all the Disney classics, but the first film I have full actual memories of seeing is The Poseidon Adventure.

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It was 1972 and Irwin Allen’s gigantic blockbuster disaster movies were all the rage.

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The premise was simple. Assemble a huge cast and blow them up. Or burn them down. Or in this case, sink them.

I’ve seen the film many times since then ( not by choice, because the husband is always tuned to the old turkey channel ) but my first time will always be special… because I was with my dad.

My late father was not a movie person. Hell, we didn’t even have a television in the house when I was young and when we finally did get one …. it was banished to a small rarely used room.

But on that day my mother was busy and my father offered to take me to the movies. I was an only child, a total daddy’s girl and the mere idea of it was heaven.

We picked the perfect seats and had the perfect snacks. (Hot buttered popcorn and Milk Duds in case you’re wondering) The lights dimmed, the music swelled and I settled in for a wonderful afternoon. I chattered like a magpie in the beginning and my father patiently and quietly answered all my inane questions.

Then it was happening. The actors were in place, the music changed to something ominous and then… the wave. The huge wave was about to sink the ship! It was loud! It was thrilling! People were screaming! Oh, the horror! I glanced over to gauge my father’s reaction to the cinematic magnificence before us….. and saw that he was sound asleep.

I didn’t have the heart to wake him… he worked long stress filled hours as the Vice President of a stock brokerage firm…. so I sat silently and watched the rest of the movie by myself.

He roused near the end, and pretended to have seen the whole thing. I pretended to believe him. And after all these years, it’s still one of the silly little memories of him that makes me cry.

So how about you?

What was the first movie you remember seeing.

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42 thoughts on “Let’s play.”

      1. Not at all. If you’re over 10yrs old, they suck!

        Though, I had fun at a local pop-up drive in… mostly because it was a special event. And I have fond memories of watching a drive in movie in a lawn chair back in the days of speaker boxes.

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  4. Not a clue. Being older than dirt, I grew up in a small steel mill town in an era when in the summer, the kids left the house at dawn and came home for dinner. Every Saturday, we could walk to the theater to see a double feature accompanied by a bunch of cartoons.
    I love your story about seeing the movie with your dad.

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  5. Like you, I’m sure my parents took me to Disney movies, but the first movie that really stands out in my memory is when they took me to see Star Wars at the drive-in. I’m positive we went there before that because I remember playing on the playground before it got dark and the movies started, but I don’t remember what we saw. I probably fell asleep.

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    2. StarWars at a drive in???? It wouldn’t have nearly the same effect when the big ship comes in from overhead!!

      Was that the days of sound boxes or was sound broadcast over the car radio?

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  6. It was probably a Disney movie but the first thing I will NEVER forget was my dad taking me to the Royal Lipizzaner Stallions at the Mary E. OMG…I was on the edge of my seat the WHOLE time. He knew I was horse crazy and this was the best present ever!! I was 13 … so it was a few years ago *coughhushcough* but I remember it like it was yesterday.

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  9. Sadly it was a Mexican film, at a drive in, but like you the most cherished memory because it was the last memory of my paternal grandmother laughing at it and sitting in between my parents. Which I thought was odd, at the time because I was only about six years old. But now it’s hilarious because my mom says she sat between them all the time because as she put it, my dad was a mommas boy 😝🤣😂.

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  10. This is so sweet and made me tear up. Thanks for that!

    The first movie I ever saw in a theater was Bambi. My Mom took me which was also a rarity as she worked a lot and didn’t usually have ‘free time’.

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  11. My first experience at a movie theatre was either Santa Claus vs. The Martians (for a children’s Christmas party from my dad’s work…each kid got a present after the movie…wheee!) or Disney’s The Jungle Book…I’m leaning towards the Santa one. Both were at the same theatre…the only one for miles around, in the city next to our little town.

    Deb

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  14. Between the ages of 1 and 10 I must have seen a thousand movies!!! My family went EVERY Sunday to see a double feature–that’s a minimum of 104 movies a year—saw more after I was 5 as we were sent to the movies on Saturday also to get out of my parents fighting weekends!!
    I have a feeling it was either James Cagney (my father’s favorite) in “Dirty Angels Have Faces” or Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn (my mother’s favorites) in “Bring Up Baby”—years later when I saw them again they seemed familiar so who knows!!

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  17. Not counting Horse Opera Saturdays, which, except for Black Jack Ketchum, were all more than forgettable, the first adult movie I saw was Love Me Tender. I bawled my eyes out when Elvis Presley died. Then, when I saw him alive on Ed Sullivan a few weeks later, I learned how to hate. The asshole didn’t have the good sense to stay dead after I wasted so many tears on him. My cat stayed dead after being killed by a car. The tears I cried for him were not wasted. The ones I cried for Elvis: saltwater under the theatre seat!

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