Warner Village Cinema: The First Few Times I Went to the Cinema

You hear a lot of us bang on about how the 90s were great. I mean a lot of great things came about that decade. Disney released their biggest animated hits, Pixar became a household name, Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon made their debut on TV, cereals were still having free gifts inside like CD-ROMs (some being demos of games and just promoting stuff) and toys, nearly every single fast food chain in existence at the time had all their kids meals come with movie tie in toys, Star Trek made a come back on the big and small screens and lots of other great things. Of course there were some not so good things as well like Doctor Who coming to it's end with a failed revival in the form of a TV movie, Jar Jar Binks ruining the start of the prequel era of Star Wars (the era of which was the one I grew up with), A bad Superman game on the Nintendo 64 that ruined any chance of him ever having his own game again and possibly other bad things too. But today we are going back to those days as I talk about a cinema that unlike most cinemas today, was quite something to behold. Let's talk about it:

So during the 80s and 90s, most film studios had their own chain of cinemas across Europe. Universal and Paramount had UCI (which is also known as Odeon) while Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow had the appropriately titled Warner Village (nowadays known as Vue). Growing up in Cambridgeshire, I would often go to the latter to watch films often accompanied by friends and family, and it really felt like going into Hollywood itself with the glitz and glamour of it all the while seeing the Looney Tunes as the cinema chain's mascots. They would be on the cups, do a hilarious but informative video of the cinema rules before finally doing some minor adjustments just as the film begins. It was this cinema where I went to see the original Lion King, the first Toy Story, Rugrats and Pokemon films (and this was a time when anime films were getting released in cinemas in western parts of the world as well as Japan unlike today where its straight to home media) and possibly many other films too. Pretty sure I went here to also watch A Bug's Life and the first Shrek film. It was a cinema with character and of all the things I regret not doing when coming here, it was not seeing Space Jam because for a cinema where the Looney Tunes are the mascots, it would've been a great fit despite the film not being all that great.

Vue and Cineworld may be the two biggest cinema chains in the UK these days (alongside all the independent- ones and other chains that haven't got as many cinemas out there), but they just couldn't compete with the cinemas of old during a time when streaming didn't exist and the internet was just finding its footing. There are other cinema stories I remember like the time I went to the tallest cinema in world to watch Happy Feet (this was a Cineworld in Glasgow, Scotland), the time when I went to see The Phantom Menace and the cinema screwed up the timings and I saw the ending before watching the whole film (though probably for the best as it wasn't a great film), the time I saw The Order of the Phoenix with language students that cheered and cried throughout (this would be at the cinema now known as The Light, originally known as Cineworld in Cambridge), the first time I went to an IMAX cinema (in the London Science Museum) and so many other great stories. I don't know if we will ever see a cinema like Warner Village again, but it was truly something and had that quirkiness to it that not many cinemas have these days. The rules video alone is up there as being among some of the best rule explaining videos out there alongside the Turkish Airlines LEGO one and the British Airways celebrity one.

But you know, cinemas are great regardless of how they are presented. They may be expensive, but worth it for all those big films that you just can't watch on a small screen. Maybe you have cinema stories of your own and if you do, feel free to leave comments below and let's hope this pandemic doesn't cause any more problems for these cinemas (or theatres if that's what you call them in your world).