The joy and excitement of cinema...and how it’s changed over the years

​Cinema is a good example of this. Of course, picture houses were around back in the 1970s and 80s, but for a young boy growing up in rural north Antrim, a trip to see a movie on the big screen was as rare as teeth on a newborn baby. We were assured of the excitement of Christmas once a year - but the cinema was a much more elusive treat.

The closest cinemas to my home were in Coleraine and Portrush and they were a world away from the modern multiscreen complexes. So infrequent and totemic were our visits to these establishments that I can still remember every occasion with a clarity not much dimmed by the decades.

We went to see the first Superman movie, which must have been in 1978 or ‘79. The famous scene where a flying Christopher Reeve rescues a falling Lois Lane with one arm and then grabs a plummeting helicopter with the other remains an iconic childhood memory.

We went to see Disney’s Jungle Book (Wikipedia tells me this movie was first released in 1967, but it was early 1980s when I went to see it). I recall the film being unexpectedly interrupted by a large glowing message on the screen stating ‘INTERMISSION’ while a man walked along the aisles selling tubs of ice cream from a tray.

My other childhood memory of cinema was going to see Ghostbusters in 1984. There was so much excitement around the release of this film that I secured an element of minor celebrity in my class at primary school when it became known I had seen it on the big screen.

And that was it. Back before on-demand home streaming services, or even owning a video recorder, most of the good films could only be watched when they eventually were shown on television. I waited many years to see the legendary Star Wars.The sequel to Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark had already been released before I got to enjoy the original.

I well remember the flurry of youthful excitement which surrounded the release of ET in 1982. I was well immersed in that culture, owning an array of stationery featuring images of the odd-looking alien and spending my pocket money on stickers to fill my ET album. I knew most everything about ET, but it was another three or four years, when the craze had long since passed, before I got to actually see the movie on TV.

My Da used to buy the Coleraine Chronicle every week, a newspaper then so large and ungainly, that you could have constructed a small tent from a single edition. I would go straight to the entertainment page to see what was on at the cinema. There may be few actions which illustrate the change in youthful experience over the decades more than the hours I spent gazing at the small black and white publicity photos for that week’s movie in the paper. They seemed impossibly glamorous amid the long lines of black type.

In 1985 I was desperate to see Rocky IV. I waited months for it to be released at the cinema, scanning the paper every week, just for the small thrill of seeing the photo of Rocky, but knowing surely that I would not be going.

By the following year we had a VHS video recorder in our home. There was one shop in Ballycastle which rented out videos and we would go each Saturday morning to pick a film. The problem was they had only one copy of each new movie, and I would rush there with hopes high only to find every week that Rocky IV was already rented out. In a sad extension to the habit of gazing at the newspaper listings, I would, every week, hungrily examine the movie’s VHS cover on the shelf, reading every word of the blurb over and over.

In the early 1990s the Jet Centre opened in Coleraine with a four-screen cinema. By then I was old enough to go out with friends rather than parents and the picture house experience started to become more regular. Ghost was the first movie I watched there. When I moved to Belfast as a student, going to the cinema became routine.

One of the joys of parenthood is sharing cinema experiences with my son. This took longer to crystallise than I had expected, as he was initially a little intimidated by the noise and the darkness. But now he is comfortable in the environment and we go often. Cinema, once a treat that I could barely hope to dream about, has become something to do to fill the time on a wet day.

My boy was excited to see the new Super Mario Brothers film. I was working on the day, so my wife took him on the first morning of its UK release. They told me they were going to see it in 4DX. I had to Google this. Apparently, it means that the seats move and there are “environmental effects such as water, wind, fog, scent, snow and more”.

At the weekend we went to watch the new Dungeons and Dragons movie. This, we watched in ScreenX, which means that the action is panoramic. The movie is projected not only on the screen in front of you but on the side walls as well.

I slept through the first part of it. When I stirred myself, I spent more time focusing on my son than the action on the screen(s). He was clearly enjoying himself.

I thought about a different time and a young boy who rarely got to go to the cinema, who used to gaze longingly at movie photographs in the paper and wait years to see blockbusters on the telly. It all seems a long time ago.