For better or worse, they sure don't make movies like they used to. The same could be said about the moviegoing experience of yesterday vs. today. 

Back in the day, say before 1975, there was no such animal as a multiplex, ticket prices were cheaper, cartoons were a staple and you could sometimes see two or three movies for the price of admission. And even those buckets of popcorn and boxes of Sno-Caps seemed bigger.

"It felt like you were having an experience, like something special was happening," said Keith Crocker, a Baldwin-based filmmaker and film scholar.

Amid that glow of nostalgia, let's zoom in on some things about going to the movies we wish would come back.

New York City was famed for its Art Deco movie theaters. (Who didn't head into Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan for its big holiday movie offering and its Christmas spectacular starring the Rockettes?) But Long Island also had its share of golden movie palaces, such as the Syosset Cinerama, the Calderon Theatre in Hempstead, the Century Fantasy (formerly The Strand) in Rockville Centre and many others.

"The Rockville Centre theater had a balcony and a mezzanine," Crocker said. "I saw a revival of 'The Exorcist' there in 1979. To see it in a theater of such splendor was remarkable."

Crocker attributes the rise of the multiplex to the phenomenon of "Star Wars" in 1977. "People were wrapping themselves around the theater in lines. After that initial explosion, the logic was to cut theaters into four theaters," he said.

Up until the 1970s, it wasn't unusual to see two movies for the price of one at local theaters.

During Hollywood's heyday through the 1950s, all of the major studios had a "B" unit designed to produce short features, also called programmers, that ran about 75 minutes and could serve as the bottom half of a double bill. Audiences also got a newsreel, film short, cartoons and trailers along with the features.

The birth of television was the death knell for newsreels and shorts, though cartoons still popped up in theaters until the early 1980s when United Artists stopped producing its Pink Panther 'toons.

Hard to believe, but back in the Depression-era, you could get a whole dinnerware set just by going to the movies. Theaters would offer a different piece of crockery each week, from saucers to gravy boats, as a means to boost plummeting ticket sales. 

Though free dishes were all dried up by the 1950s, theaters did offer other freebies to go with a movie. Crocker, who also teaches adult education film classes at Hutton House at LIU Post in Brookville, recalled seeing the 1986 Billy Crystal-Gregory Hines buddy cop movie "Running Scared" at Sunrise Cinemas in Valley Stream, where everyone got a 45-rpm record of the theme song "Sweet Freedom" by Michael McDonald. "I still have it to this day," he said.

From the artistic film posters that donned theater walls to creative tie-ins to movies, theaters had an ambience that enhanced the experience. Crocker remembers one particularly striking effect at one theater tied to George A. Romero's 1982 shocker, "Creepshow."

"One of the segments was called 'The Crate,' so in the lobby the theater had on display a crate that moved and made growling noises," he said. "It made you really want to see the movie."