First:
There used to be a movie theater on Sunrise Highway in Massapequa where we saw Star Trek IV. That was the story about Kirk and company using a Klingon Bird of Prey to bring 20th Century whales into the 23rd Century in order to save Earth from apparent doom. I enjoyed hearing Spock ask Kirk in one great stressful moment if that was a good time for "a colorful metaphor". Sadly, just a few weeks later, that movie theater was shut down and the building was razed.
Not too much later, I saw new construction taking place on that site which looked to me like a new movie theater being put up. My hopes were further raised when I saw a big sign that said "Infiniti". Wow! The first movie they were going to show would be a new sci-fi epic. I wanted that new theater to hurry up and get built so I could see this new film.
I didn't know then that "Infiniti" was a brand new name for a car and that the building was only going to be a car dealership. (Sigh.) It's still there, by the way.
Second:
In the summer of 1956, Warner Brothers released a movie called "The Animal World". It was an animated documentary about the history of life and was billed as covering all that was known in paleontology at the time.
OH MY did I ever want to see that.
There had been a "still" from this movie published in Mechanix Illustrated and just to further whet my appetite, I met another kid who had a comic book of "The Animal World". To my dismay though, I couldn't find that comic book in any store for myself.
Each day I would see this movie's ads in the newspapers and each day I asked my parents to take me to see it. Unfortunately, we had to be someplace on this weekend and had to go somewhere else on the next weekend and .......
Of course, going to see it during the work week was simply out of the question and as the days went by, I knew that this movie was going to be gone soon and I was sure that it would never come back.
Finally!!! On the last Saturday of August 1956, my Dad took me to the Parsons Boulevard theater in Jamaica to see it. According to an ad in The Daily News, that Saturday was going to be the last day in which "The Animal World" would be featured. We arrived at the theater and...... The film's last day had been the day before on Friday. When we'd arrived, it was gone.
I waited through the next forty years in hopes that it might one day be shown on television but that never happened. Years and years and years later, I found a newspaper article about disintegrations of old movie films as a consequence of neglect and improper storage. Several films were cited as having been destroyed this way and, yes, "The Animal World" was one of them. There was nothing left of it except for a few feet of film scraps.
(Another sigh.)
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