There are certain combinations that seem to be made for each other – peanut butter and jelly, politics and corruption, french fries and ketchup, and of course, my favorite: popcorn and movies. The thought of going to a theater and watching a movie without that barrel of popcorn is almost
unthinkable. Sure, that tub costs as much as dinner for two at a Chinese buffet, but somehow the movie-going experience is incomplete without that tub of buttery, crunchy goodness getting all over your shirt as you munch away in the dark. But how did this tradition get started. To find out, you have to go way back, to a time when it didn’t matter if the person next to you was talking during the movie because there was nothing else in the theater to listen to.Popcorn and the Movies – OriginsAt first theater owners hated popcorn. It made a mess in their theaters. They felt it distracted from the movie experience. At this time, popcorn was sold primarily by street vendors, who would push their popcorn carts around and sell popcorn to people walking down the sidewalks. Movie theaters were attractive places for these street vendors because they could count on crowds of people at regular intervals.Most theater owners considered these street vendors a nuisance. People would get up during a movie to go outside the theater and buy popcorn. But then theater owners began to realize that they could be profiting from popcorn instead of the street vendors. Popcorn Comes InsideIn 1925 Charles Manley, an inventor from Butte, Montana, perfected the first electric popcorn machine. He marketed the machine to movie theater owners, and one of the most successful combinations in culinary history was born.
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