Before I get into the movies, Donnie brought his dog Una tonight. She's an absolute sweetheart.
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Out of all of the movies that have been scheduled at the Mahoning since we first started coming here five years ago, I think that I was looking forward to the first movie of Fantasy Friday the most.
I was never much of a Disney kid growing up. It's not that I disliked their movies or cartoons. In fact, some of their cartoons and movies are among my childhood favorites, like Flight Of The Navigator, The Three Caballeros, and Duck Tales, but I was was more into things like Loony Tunes, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Danger Mouse, Dungeons and Dragons, and Charlie Brown than anything that you'd find on The Disney Channel. However, there was one production from The House of Mouse that holds a special place in my heart, and that is the 1985 full length animated feature, The Black Cauldron.
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| Standard Speaker - Hazleton, PA (July 25, 1985) |
The Black Cauldron was the first movie that I ever saw in theaters. It came out just a few weeks after my fifth birthday and my grandfather brought me to the Hersker to see it. That's the theater that I wrote about a few days ago that eventually became the Cinema & Drafthouse in West Hazleton which closed this month. I thought that this was the coolest thing in the world when I saw it on the big screen.
I even had the Book and Record which I read and listened to countless times when I was a kid. It's kind of amazing that these are now archived on YouTube. Technology can be pretty cool sometimes.
The first feature of the night was The Black Cauldron, which marks the second time I've seen it on 35mm in forty years. It was a beautiful print from 1990 when it was re-released in select test markets under the title Taran And The Magic Cauldron, but apart from the slight change in the title card, the movie is exactly the same as I remember seeing with my grandfather when I was five years old.
The second feature was a 35mm presentation of the 1982 animated classic The Last Unicorn. I'm pretty sure that I've seen at least part of this movie at some point in my life, but I didn't remember very much of it. For all intent and purposes, it's the first time that I paid attention to the entire movie and it's excellent.
I brought in the Bluray of my favorite animated feature ever made to play as the secret feature. I'm not going to name it here, but you can probably guess. It was an incredible experience seeing it on the big screen, but I'm hopeful for a 35mm screening next season.
