Springfield’s Cascade Drive-In Theatre opened on August 19th, 1950 with a premier showing of Curtain Call at Cactus Creek (1950). The grand opening event (and selected Western comedy) especially targeted families: the Cascade Drive-In advertised the convenience of attending with children; offering free tickets to attendees under ten.
In the following years, the Cascade continued to offer an abundance of comedies, Westerns, and romances; occasionally showing action or crime films. Some releases dated five or more years earlier than the theater’s screenings, such as Abilene Town (1946), but the Cascade’s program largely boasted recent films in the wake of its opening. Later on, beginning in the mid-seventies, the theater started showing higher-production blockbuster films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) or Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), which would run for several nights as opposed to single showings. Ticketing practices similarly adjusted, and the Cascade alternated between charging per car or attendee.
The late seventies to early eighties marked some of the theater’s most significant transitions in content and pricing, however. The family-friendly films of the previous decades increasingly became replaced with R-rated comedies, cult classics, or horror movies—with some screenings featuring sexually-explicit pictures. Listings in The Register-Guard advertised Gas Pump Girls (1979) and Cheerleaders’ Beach Party (1978) as a double-feature in 1979 and Getting It On (1983) followed by Spring Fever (1982) in 1983. Not long after, the Cascade Drive-In permanently closed. Sharp increases in ticket prices during the preceding years—and the theater’s sudden exploration of new genre offerings—may provide an interesting source for investigation as research on the Cascade continues.
