I'm not really sure, but that's what happened with Village Cinema's drive-in in Coburg. Google Maps shows that it's only 12.7 kilometers from my house, and in a separate transaction, Google shows me that 12.7 kilometers is 7.89 miles.
To put that in perspective, my most recent run on Friday afternoon was 7.57 miles. A little extra push and I could run to this drive-in from my house, though somebody would have to pick me up to take me home.
I suspect having kids at the wrong age has something to do with it. As my kids are now 10 and 7, they have really only been a patient drive-in audience for a couple years now. In a bit of a funny twist, they went to this drive-in even before their old man did, with their aunt, who lives just a stone's throw from it. (And in fact, there's a run along a stream that I do when I've dropped them off at her house, and you can see the backs of the drive-in screens from the running path.) But my wife and I had never been, as apparently we have never prioritized this for a date night on the occasions her sister was watching the kids. It's taken nearly eight years for all the variables to finally align.
The Coburg Drive-In has certainly been operating a lot longer than those eight years, or 7.54 years, if we're already talking about things that are seven and a fraction. Google again tells me that it opened in November of 1965, though it closed from 1984 to 1987 before being acquired by its current corporate parent, Village Cinemas. I'm kind of surprised it didn't spend more time closed given how drive-ins fell off the cultural landscape for a while there. (The year 1984 is an interesting benchmark in my personal drive-in history, as that was the year I attended my first drive-in on a visit to Colombia, South America -- and didn't go again until 2002 in Los Angeles.)
I almost missed my chance. There was word that they were planning to close it, a probably not unexpected development after the rise of streaming started to reduce the hunger for the theatrical experience in general. Then again, drive-ins are an entirely different type of experience, as COVID-19 has taught us, and now the place seems to be thriving.
How thriving? When we were driving in, we were told we had to park two cars between each white metal pole with the concrete bases that littered the parking lot, which once held the speakers out of which the sound played. (Nowadays you tune your car to a certain FM frequency to get the sound.) This maximizing of available space was necessary to accommodate all the tickets they'd sold. We twice tried to park our car in such a way that two cars could squeeze in, but we never could manage it. What can you say, Fords are not known for their sleek design.
You can tell from the menus at the on-site diner that it's meant to evoke 50s nostalgia, though this little number at the entrance is your first indication of that endeavor:
The Dromana Drive-In, which we attended on New Year's Eve a couple years ago (as discussed in this post), has an X-Wing fighter above its entrance rather than this beauty. I guess vehicles perched atop the ticket booth -- be they real or fictional -- are a thing at Australian drive-ins.
The actual experience was not really noteworthy in any way. Unlike most of the other drive-ins I've visited, this one is set up for only one movie rather than a double feature, which is just as well. My kids didn't get to bed until nearly 11 as it was, even with an 8:20 start to the movie, and I had no need to tack an extra couple hours on to that.
I guess I should tell you, though the poster art has stolen my thunder, that we saw Raya and the Last Dragon, Disney's latest. It was enjoyable to watch without feeling particularly distinctive. I'm supposed to be reviewing it but haven't written anything yet.
I did have some of the normal "why are people the way they are" annoyance about this drive-in experience. For example, there were still cars arriving and jockeying for viewing spots 20 minutes into the movie. Come on, at that point you've just missed the experience. Cut your losses and do something else with your evening.
Of course, this probably wouldn't have annoyed me as much if I'd been inside the car. I chose to sit outside in a camping chair, at least for the first 45 minutes, at which point it was getting a bit nippy and my wife asked if she could close the car windows. This would cut off my access to the sound, so I moved inside the car with the rest of the family. Which turned out to be both a warmer and more sonically optimized way to view the movie.
The diner burger I bought repeated on me a bit -- we actually had to crank down the windows on the way home to escape the toxicity of my burps -- but overall it was a really good experience that we expect to do again a lot sooner than 7.54 years from now. If 2021 has a fairly normal slate of high-end children's movies released, we could be back in just a couple months.
In fact, Raya gave a slightly skewed indication of the current popularity of the drive-in experience. It seems clear it's a thing being embraced by families, not the groups of young people who may have once been the venue's bread and butter. There were far fewer cars for Chaos Walking, which started on the neighboring screen about 45 minutes after Raya, and fewer still for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on the third screen, though I watched that screen fondly as we drove out, The Two Towers being my favorite of those movies. Of course, one of those is a new release that's been poorly reviewed by critics (including me) and one of those is 20 years old, so they may not provide the perfect barometer of the health of the drive-in as an institution.
Even the Raya ticket sales may be an example of artificially inflated enthusiasm, though, as this was a Disney film, in its opening weekend, on a three-day weekend, at the tail end of summer. You can't duplicate those specific conditions every weekend. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this was the theater's biggest single night since the pandemic began.
The internet tells me the drive-in is still for sale, but I guess that's not necessarily a bad thing. Being for sale is different than deciding to tear the screens down. It's a pretty big commitment to prevent a vacant lot from being able to function as a drive-in, as there would have to be a pretty compelling competing usage in order for a prospective buyer to remove the screens entirely. Hopefully even if it does close for a period, as it did in the mid-1980s, they'd keep the screens up and leave it just a buyer away from rejuvenating.
So let's keep pumping out those Raya and the Last Dragons, which can carry Coburg through and allow the rest of us to see our occasional Lords of the Ringses.
And if other families have kids like mine -- who declared the movie one of the best they'd ever seen, and also the night one of the best nights they'd ever had -- then the Coburg Drive-In should be with us for the foreseeable future.
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