This one got completely by me. I walked into a DVD store the other day and was surprised to see that a favorite film of my childhood — Hey There, It's Yogi Bear — had been released on disc. Had I known this, I would have beaten a few drums in advance. It wasn't the kind of film to make Mr. Disney worry but I was a huge fan of Yogi and other Hanna-Barbera shows at the time it came out — 1964 — so I enjoyed the hell out of it.
I saw it at the Picwood Theater, which is no longer there…but when it was, it was near the intersection of Pico Boulevard and Westwood Boulevard in West L.A. Here's a photo of the Picwood taken, I assume, shortly after it was built in 1946. By the time I started going there, it was no longer a free-standing building as in that picture. On one side was a bowling alley that was connected to the theater. On the other was a building that kept changing tenants…and one of those tenants was, for several years, the Blue Chip Stamp redemption center that I wrote about in this post.
And if you're going to click around this site, you can find more info about the movie, including a video clip of its best sequence, over here.
Since I'm throwing out memories: I think Hey There, It's Yogi Bear was the first movie I ever attended without my parents. They loved me but not enough, I guess, to sit through that one. Some time in June of '64, I went with my classmate Valerie who lived a few blocks away and was about to move to another city, far far away. So it was kind of a "going-away" day with Valerie. My folks drove us to the Picwood, gave us cash for tickets and popcorn, and dropped us off. Then they picked us up when the film let out and drove us over to Valerie's house, where they left us so we could go in this great Highboy swimming pool she had. I think the water was about two feet deep and the pool was about ten feet in diameter…so you couldn't do a lot of swimming in it. But we got into our suits and splashed around for a while.
Valerie's parents were away so we were all alone there in the pool. Suddenly, surprising the heck out of me, Valerie suggested that since we would probably never see each other again after that day, we ought to really see each other and take off our swimsuits. I refused and she withdrew the suggestion. Why did I decline? Well, remember I was just a little more than twelve years old at the time. If she'd offered a few months later, I would have been interested.
Here's an Amazon link via which you can order a copy of Hey There, It's Yogi Bear. And here's a link via which you can purchase A Man Called Flintstone, which apparently came out on DVD at the same time, and which I didn't like nearly as much as Yogi's film.