For many years now, the closest major movie theaters to my house have been of the Consolidated variety. They’re pretty much interchangeable with any other mega-multi-plex and have their own little pre-show cartoon movie that reminds you to hush now, look for the exits (and remember that there’s one in the front of the theater too), and buy lots of candy and popcorn and soda.

Well, for the last several years the little pre-movie at Consolidated Theaters has, quite frankly, driven me batty, for several reasons:

• The graphics were so, 1996! You could’ve gotten your average 14-year old to do something much *much* more professional
• It featured a “space-age” (or vaguely futuristic-looking, I suppose) car zooming around a city full of snacks and trash cans and exit signs (think The Fifth Element, but much less well thought-out and with a strange Hershey’s obsession)

So none of that is particularly terrible, except for the fact that the zooming car made me dizzy! Now I love roller coasters, and tend to be unfazed by boats and other “seasickness”-inducing phenomena, so it’s not like it made me ill or anything …it was just a wee bit disorienting. And the decision to make things all swoopy (and potentially nauseating) always struck me as unwise, assuming you really did want people to go buy more popcorn or Twizzlers.

But now they’ve replaced the disorienting space chase by some sort of Battle of the Junk Foods, which, though uninspired (and not likely to cause hunger), at least looks like it was animated in the 21st century.