1933 Fifty Years Ago

On June 6 two entrepreneurs named Richard Hollingshead, Jr., and Willis Smith opened the world’s first drive-in movie theater on a ten-acre site in Camden, New Jersey. The screen was forty by fifty feet, and the sound equipment was supplied by the RCA-Victor Company. There were two shows a night. Nine rows of inclined ramps accommodated five hundred cars.

In the same month, Disney released the cartoon feature Three Little Pigs in something like living color. (It was not, however, the first color cartoon: that honor goes to an epic entitled The Debut of Thomas Kat , made in New York City in 1916.) Two men particularly interested in the fortunes of the pigs were the cousins Jock and Sonny Whitney. They announced that they had bought a substantial share of the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation and were forming a production company, Pioneer Pictures, to make feature-length color films.