HARDY COURT

Every time I watch a movie at a Rave or Cinemark Theater, I think about the improvements that movie houses have made in the last couple of decades. Can you imagine doing without stadium seats with cushy padding and cup holders? But for all their amenities, there’s a missing quality in these new megaplexes, something special that my old hometown theater had. It seemed like it was my theater, like it existed just for me.

The seats at the Hardy Court Theater were sticky, uncomfortable and smelled a little like dirty socks, but they were the first place I watched a big screen film. In 1986, I turned 12. Previous years my parents threw me a regular birthday bash with a cake and balloons. Desperate to grow up, that year I asked for something other than a kiddie party, so Mom drove my friend Steve and me to the theater. I can recall a few sketchy details of that evening. I know what gifts I received. My parents gave me a Swatch and an Ocean Pacific sweater; Steve gave me a Transformer. The food is a little less clear, but I think we went to Baskin Robbins for ice cream after the flick. More vivid are my memories of the theater and the movie. I perceived them as a milestone - a first taste of adult life, so both made a big impression.

Flight of the Navigator is about a 12-year-old boy (one hit wonder Joey Cramer) who’s abducted by aliens. He ends up in the care of a robot (voiced by Paul Reubens), and he must fight to return home. It’s a coming of age story, and the boy gradually learns to make his own decisions and to “navigate” life. There’s a time travel twist that complicates things for him. When the boy returns to Earth, he finds he has traveled 8 years into the future. To his confused dismay, everything once familiar is now different, and everyone he loved has changed. It’s that discontinuity, life flying by as he slowly matures, that I identify with now. It sustains the original memory - the connection fostered that night.

Many changes are driven by people’s constant desire for improvement – bigger, better, faster, more. So it’s appropriate, if not totally symbolic, that the Hardy Court Theater closed in 1987 to make room for a laser tag maze. A new and improved theater across town took its place. I saw many shows there as a teenager, but I never felt that same special connection with a movie or a theater, like I did at the Hardy Court watching Flight of the Navigator.