Drive-In Movie Hats

In 1958 the United States had 4,063 drive-in theaters. By 2019 about 305 were left, and by 2024 roughly 283, most of them independently owned by people who call it a labor of love and, for many, a second job. From late March to mid-August 2020, drive-ins took 85 percent of the US box office, against 2.9 percent in the same stretch of 2019. These drive-in movie hats are for the people who keep showing up. DRIVE-IN MOVIE and DRIVE-IN THEATER are the search terms, DRIVE-IN KID is for anyone raised in pajamas in the back of the station wagon, and DRIVE-IN DOUBLE FEATURE is for the intermission trip to the snack bar and the playground. The rest is folklore. Kids crawled into the trunk of another kid's car and hoped to make it past the ticket window unnoticed, as columnist Terry Woster recalls, and grown-ups still remember the smell of the mosquito coil and a speaker on the window that did not always work. The sentence designs carry that: the trunk sneak-in, a conception confession, the rule that the worse the movie the better the drive-in, and a grown adult in pajamas at the show. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat. Wear it to the lot, or give it to the parent who still packs the blankets.