

- #MEDIA ROOM CARPET MOVIE#
- #MEDIA ROOM CARPET FULL#
- #MEDIA ROOM CARPET PASSWORD#
- #MEDIA ROOM CARPET FREE#
In an effort to go upmarket, movie theaters started offering larger and therefore fewer seats. The Dimensional guys said that by the mid-aughts, movie theaters shifted towards more upscale designs: Art Deco-inspired “old Hollywood” interiors, or even just spaces that look like nice hotel lobbies. More accurately, they faded to beige and maroon. In public movie theaters, however, those patterns have since faded to black. They’re for sale, so you’ve got to assume someone has. You can still buy them for your own home theater. The Durkan Fun Time Collection of patterns was born, a carpet catalogue containing a boundless galaxy of squiggles, stars, planets, movie reels, gradients, confetti, swirls, soundwaves, swishes, and more. They wanted something outlandish, that made you feel like you were at a theme park-and they got it. The chaos was a response to the desires of multiplex owners in the 1990s. Katafiasz tells me that they officially branded this genre of carpeting as Electra-Dye.


“It made it easy to clean, but people complained about how their feet would stick to the floor. “There used to be tile underneath the seats,” says Trotter.
#MEDIA ROOM CARPET FULL#
Once the global blockbuster era hit full swing (think Jurassic Park, Titanic, et al) people were going to the movies in droves, spilling their sugary drinks and melty Milk Duds on the floor in record numbers. You weren’t just watching a film from somewhere besides your sofa-you were Going to The Movies!īut why the carpets? According to Dimensional Innovations, it was actually a practical maneuver. Theater chains wanted moviegoing to feel larger-than-life. Remember the Regal Cinemas snacks ad, simulating a roller coaster through space? That debuted in the 1990s. Movie theaters had a hell of a lot to compete with, including one another. (Dive! opened in Vegas, and I went when I was 12. Angelenos might remember when Steven Spielberg mounted an immersive submarine-themed restaurant called Dive! where sirens blared and the room became faux-submerged in water.
#MEDIA ROOM CARPET PASSWORD#
New Yorkers could go to Ninja, where a masked guide gave you a password to lower a drawbridge to your table, or Mars 2112, which escorted diners around the restaurant via a “rocket” ride to Mars. The hourly “storm” at the Rainforest Cafe. The house performances at the Hard Rock Cafe.

#MEDIA ROOM CARPET FREE#
Like an obscure one-hit-wonder earworm, the carpets might keep bugging you, prompting you to wonder: How is it that we, as a society, spent that much free time in these bizarre wall-to-wall settings without ever wondering what acid-doused party monster’s fever dreamt them up? Who decided this is what movie theaters should look like? What was this “style” even called? Those frenzied, high-octane, blacklight carpets that took over movie theaters for a small, fixed period of time and then mostly just… went away. You might start thinking first about the carpets. One year into life without movie theaters and you might begin to wonder: What was that? It was ambient and nearly universal, and yet absolutely the opposite of timeless. Like cartoon corporatism and hypermodernism getting smashed through a cultural particle collider. But it was weird! If you went to the movies around this time anywhere in the United States, you might’ve registered a similar aesthetic. Imagine: gray gradient carpets with cheddar yellows and splashes of teal absolutely everywhere. The memory of the place is hazy (though I remember stumbling out of Go, 13 years old and giddy from successfully sneaking in) but the feeling of the UA remains. My own version of the Odyssey was the UA Showcase in the late 1990s in the Las Vegas Strip. AMC Theaters was launching a “brand new concept… a fancy interior that transforms the otherwise plain theater into a science-fiction, high-tech experience,” replete with decorative planets, the colors teal, purple, and yellow, and a “generally upbeat design.” Its name: the Odyssey. In the fall of 1997, a blurb appeared in the Atlanta Business Chronicle.
