First of three long pages of a great morning at Bandimere Speedway in Morrison, CO, fortunately 10 minutes from where I live.

I am going to let the pictures do the talking! This page is ’50s-’70s. The next two posts will be much older hot rods!

And I recently did the Facebook thing

Pete’s Satire Lounge sign on Colfax has fresh paint on it.

They rehabbed the interior as well. They redecorated in a similar
fashion to Pete’s Greek Town Cafe.

The Satire is famous for the earliest parts of the careers of the
Smothers Brothers, Judy Collins and Bob Dylan.

I’ve drawn the beautiful Satire sign in 3D before, click and see.

West Colfax Drive-In sign illustration

Built 1967. Once located where the Westland Shopping Center is now.

I really couldn’t tell the colors from the black & white source photo, so I went with the McDonald’s color theme. A nice, simple Googie design.

Google SketchUp

Drive-in film theaters are mostly long gone from the U.S. landscape and Colorado is no exception.

This beautifully restored marquee for the Holiday Drive-in is in North Boulder. It is one of the only surviving drive-in marquees in the Boulder-Denver area.

It is great that this sign was preserved, since much of Boulder’s Googie-signage was torn down before it was understood that many people may value this architectural style.

Now onto some ads from Denver’s past. . .

A wild double-feature from 1963, apparently screened in horrifying Nervo-Rama, Werewolf in a Girl’s Dormitory, and Boris Karloff in Corridors of Blood.

This was showing at the Centennial Drive-In which was in Littleton at Federal & Belleview, the Lakeshore Drive-In located out by Sloan’s Lake in Edgewater, and the Westwood theater out on W. Alameda (nowadays an x-rated film theater and wedding hall, believe it or not!)

The Lakeshore Drive-In would play movies til dawn in 1964! I’ll tell ya, these days they don’t make cars comfortable enough for folks to sit through 5 movies in one night!

Another great double-feature including The Girl in Black Stockings featuring blonde bombshell Mamie Van Doren! This was playing in 1957 at the West Drive-In (where the empty lot, with speaker poles, still remains alongside 6th Avenue) and the Monoco Drive-In which was way out in industrial north Denver at Monoco and 40th, just a little south of I-70.

Mamie returns to the Monoco and West drive-ins with Guns, Girls and Gangsters. Double-billed with B-movie director Ed Cahn’s other 1959 feature, Riot In Juvenile Prison.

Released in mesmerising Hypno-Vista, the Paramount Theatre showed Horrors of the Black Museum and The Headless Ghost in 1959. Hypno-Vision was actually just a short filmed introduction by a hypnotist! If you look closely, you can see that they were even screening a midnite showing of the great Bela Lugosi film from the ’30s, I Walked With a Zombie.

The Paramount Theatre is the only surviving film theater from old downtown Denver. It is an art deco masterpiece, take a look.

More drive-in fare with the 1957 flying saucer paranoia of Unidentified Flying Objects and Enemy From Space, playing at the North Drive-In (which was on N. Federal, just south of the 36) and the South Drive-In, once located on Belleview, east of Sante Fe.

And lastly, Japanese men in rubber suits battle it out in 1963’s King Kong vs Godzilla. This played at the RKO Orpheum, one of downtown Denver’s many lost film palaces that were located in the vincinity of 16th and Welton.

And one final item, this picture I found of a marquee for a theater that I cannot find a listing for, the West Colfax Drive-In from 1967. Where was it? I want to know! Please write.