A typical Las Vegas cinema: $18 for popcorn and a soda

In 1976, things were just a little bit different, but Americans have long loved extra butter for popcorn as well as sweet sodas to quench a desert thirst.

A chill server hands over a large popcorn Thursday at a Las Vegas cinema. Step two, getting the soda, is done by customers.

“Rocky” and a little known actor named Sylvester Stallone introduced me to cinema at a World War II-era theater in the logging town of Sandy, Ore.

In December 1976, salted popcorn was served up in a small paper bag, butter was appreciated but not proportionate to deadly sin, sodas were limited to three or four brands, and candy cravings fell to chocolates like Milk Duds and Mr. Good Bar.

Forward to the future. A visit this week to a Las Vegas multiplex reveals gluttony—set somewhere between hell and purgatory on Virgil’s guided tour of Dante’s “Divine Comedy”— but let a Catholic order of monks have beans and coffee for their Friday treat (true story). It’s their choice. We got ours as normal Americans.

In residential Las Vegas—a far cry from 1970s Philly—everything’s a little bit different, but folks still need to burn off Christmas chocolates and get out of the house. Movie theaters are occasionally appealing to locals tiring of ever rising prices along the Strip and downtown driver chaos to match a Formula One pileup.

As stoic as Spock, the young man behind the snack counter doesn’t qualify as Bob Cratchit cheery but is efficient, agreeing through neither nod nor word to refill a popcorn bucket after a customer’s stumble scatters hundreds of puffed kernels across aisle screening-room steps.

With a stumble, all that corn goes to waste during a preview.

Above the teen server is a combo menu to outdo McDonald’s. Its first photograph leaves no doubt about which is the most popular choice:

•a bucket larger than Colonel Sander’s, with enough popcorn to wipe out a Christmas-dinner appetite in a single sitting, along with a drink cup holding about 1.5 liters or three pints. Got any guess which beverage goes in most?

Does anybody really worry about calories when at the movie theater? Combo No. 1 goes for a cool $17.98 plus sales tax.

A woman strides toward the soda machine. Candies, left, run a distant second to popcorn, but their variety is high.

Popcorn and carbonated beverages are no surprise, but the price might shock visitors from smaller towns, even places like Portland, Ore.

A New Yorker might even bat an eye at $18 for popcorn and soda, without even considering the 8.38 percent Las Vegas sales tax.

In Sin City, the popcorn rises in minutes, and butter is squirted as if ketchup at the baseball park, where hand-pressed tubs have long replaced tiny packets. Something tells me the butter is not fresh off the farm.

Customers may use all the liquid butter they want, via industrial squirt machines.

Butter is shot out as if ketchup for hotdogs at the baseball park.

Popcorn at cinemas is popular in Europe, too. In Las Vegas, it puffs up in a hurry.

Butter does have a place. My Missouri-born Granny Wright, a professional cook as a younger woman, made cinnamon rolls with generous portions of butter, setting the yeast-mixed pastries under our wood stove, where they slowly rose to form. From start to finish, a good six hours was needed, not snack-counter minutes. 

In Edinburgh 33 years ago, a cinema popcorn bucket came with two or three butter squirts performed by the server. The American in me came out:

“May I have extra butter?”

Like the teen server in Las Vegas, she silently complied.

During the movie previews, a faint sense of warm liquid teased my thighs and traveled upward to baseball-catcher nether regions: A butter stain the size of a dinner plate had soaked my only good pair of pants, seeping through the paper pale.

An inch of “extra butter” rest with old maids. Was it by chance or had the Scottish lass sent me a message?

Some Americans try to give up Coca-Cola but can’t. Count me and my dad among them. We don’t drink diet either. Ever. At the Las Vegas multiplex soda machine, no fewer than eight flavors of Coke boggle cinema-goers:

• Coke classic
• Cherry Coke
• Vanilla Coke
• Cherry Vanilla
• Orange Vanilla
• Tropical Coke
• Lime Coke
• Cream Soda Coke

Times have changed since “Rocky” debuted in 1976. Eight flavors of Coke tempt movie-goers, but many other brands are a tap away.

In the early 1990s, 7-Eleven unveiled a two-liter cup for its Super Big Gulp. Cinemas today are closing the gap.

Got Coke?

Several times a year, as a resident of Italy, Italians ask me why so many types are available and whether waistlines are affected. Two out of three Americans are overweight: fact.

Who cares, right? It’s the holidays. Everybody’s entitled to a little salt-and-sugar excess.

The important thing is the movie itself so let’s angle back to “Rocky” for a second. Today’s cinematographers struggle to capture the grittier side of a town like Philly, itty bitty details like bubble gum caked onto sidewalks. As for special effects, the following might just be too simple for 2024: museum steps, swollen cheek bones, grey sweats, and quarrels between a mousy sister and her pot-belly brother.

What do I know?

George Clooney’s “The Boys in the Boat” proves Hollywood is not completely tethered to super heroes. The sports-theme film set at a state school in the Pacific Northwest, with a touch of romance—as with Balboa and Adrianna—charms those who appreciate classics.

Get me a refill, will you?

-30-