Cinematic Debut: The Drama

The Puzzle

I love movies. Many kinds of movies. 

I have no idea how many I have seen or how many theaters I have been to, but I remember very well my first visit to a theater. I think of it fairly often, most recently when the film was featured in the NYT online game Strands. 

Don't worry: I waited a couple of days before posting this screenshot from the game. As always, the puzzle has a theme, several scrambled words in blue and one Spanagram -- a scrambled word that stretches from side to side or top to bottom and summarizes the rest. 

Back to that early cinematic experience. It was 1967, Falls Church Virginia. Young Jim and Jackie Bohanan -- barely 24 themselves -- trundled their young Baby Jimmy and younger Bobby (as James and Bob were known back then) off to the local Plex (the Multiplex had not yet been invented).

There was probably popcorn -- we did not have a lavish lifestyle, but if there was a celebratory occasion, Jim and Jackie were all in. The theater darkened. The audience hushed. A tale began on the big screen -- music, wiggling pig butts, and mild peril -- all in a classic parable extolling the Protestant Work Ethic. 

And there I was: Baby Jimmy, not knowing how this would end and increasingly worried about the pigs and indignant about the behavior of Big Bad. Eventually, I could not contain myself any more. In the dark quiet of the theater -- in my best social-justice warrior voice, I blurted out:

"YOU LEAVE THOSE PIGS ALONE!"

Our parents, mortified, quickly quieted me down. Decades later, my dad did say that this is where my concern for social justice started. But in that moment, I imagine that their main thought was how quickly they could get me to quiet down -- we are not a people given to public drama. 

The Work

When I contemplated this post, I was working with two misconceptions. One is that I thought we were seeing this film in its original run. It was, in fact, made a decade before my parents were born and more than three decades before our family outing. 

The other is that I would want to include a movie trailer. Since the entire movie is less than nine minutes long, it is easy to find the entire piece on YouTube:

I am sure we did not venture out for this alone. I cannot remember what else we saw at that time, but Disney's Jungle Book might have been the feature. It was released in 1967 and has a run time of 1h18m, so I think Los Tres Cerditos might have been the opening short.