Are you ready for the summer? Are you ready to be singing this theme song ALL WEEK?
Friends, it's difficult for me to contain my excitement about this Guerilla Drive-In showing. The movie we're going to show this week is Bill Murray's first leading role: the
original "
Snobs vs. Slobs" summer-camp flick.
And it's being shown at most unbelievably summer camp-y venue possible.
Please understand that I am being totally sincere when I tell you that
watching this particular movie in this particular location will heal your soul. Want more? There's gonna be an
open snack bar -- just for us!
As if that weren't enough, this GDI showing will be the first time that the Commando Projector — sidecar, projector, gas-powered generator, and all — will be in use outside the narrow confines of my garage.
Here, just watch the first couple of minutes on YouTube. This is going to be the
BEST MOVIEGOING EXPERIENCE AVAILABLE. In this price range. First couple of minutes are below:
The Northbrook Canoe Company
Founded in 1977, Chester County canoe-rental mainstay
Northbrook Canoe represents all that is good and holy about summer fun. Headquartered in a cluster of old wooden buildings — an old feed-and-grain store — between the Brandywine Railroad and the Brandywine River, Northbrook drives repainted schoolbuses out to put-in points from three to twenty miles up and down the river.
The buses are driven by cheerful, talkative, sunburned college students.
Art students that spend all their free time painting snack bar murals, decorating their clipboards, and cutting the sleeves off their Northbrok Staff T-shirts. ONE OF THEM EVEN PLAYS THE UKELELE. Just like Tripper Harrison. Northbrook, North Star... I'm starting to suspect that Ivan Reitman was one of Northbrook's first customers, and he got a great idea for a movie while the staff were lashing the canoes to the school buses and chaffing each other.
Northbrook was started by Ezekiel C. Hubbard, Senior, who goes by "Zeke." Pictured here, with his daughters, who run the outfit with him. For the past eight years, Zeke has been trying to get the Brandywine Scenic Railway back in operation, which means that you and your canoe will be able to ride a train flatcar up the river to the put-in point. There is no emoticon to sufficiently describe the awesomeness that that would represent.
Next-day report
The showing went really well. About 40 friendly, mellow people showed up, many of whom had heard about the Guerilla Drive-In
on BoingBoing.
Most folks showed up without an AM radio, and it's a pretty small area to cover with sound, anyhow. A quick show-of-hands vote revealed that people would rather hear the sound through a genuine camoflauge-covered vacuum-tube Ampeg Lee Jackson hair-metal
amp stack rather than over portable AM radios, so we'll be going that way in future. Maybe we can weld up a trailer for the sidecar outfit to carry the sound system.
My friend and next-door neighbor
Harold Ross brought a camera with an Arecibo-sized lens to gather light, and he took this photo (click to zoom):
As if that weren't enough, this GDI showing will be the first time that the Commando Projector — sidecar, projector, gas-powered generator, and all — will be in use outside the narrow confines of my garage.
