"Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," the Academy Award-winning Western starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman, will be screened at three theaters in the Chattanooga area beginning today.
The film, which featured the song "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head," was first released on Sept. 23, 1969.
Ah, back in the good ol' days, we immediately think. Before terrorism was something to be feared in the United States, before political parties were so far apart, before mass murders were a semiannual occurrence, before drugs were such a scourge, before pornography was so readily available.
True, but also before the Internet, before many cancers could be cured, before cars got even 20 miles per gallon of gasoline, before a pollution-free Chattanooga.
Today, when we hear a divisive president sound as cynical as Barack Obama did in his State of the Union speech last week, we wonder if it's ever been so bad.
But when Butch and Sundance first graced our silver screens, before multiplexes, annual popcorn buckets and designer drink machines, Richard Nixon was in his first year as president.
The war in Vietnam was raging, and he pledged to end it. He ended it but not before widening it and not before presiding over a re-election campaign in which a break-in of the Democratic National Committee was authorized at the Watergate office complex, a break-in which eventually brought down what also was seen as a cynical, divisive presidency.
Today, the threat of terrorism seems more palpable, something closer to us after the murders of five servicemen at the Naval Reserve Center off Amnicola Highway last July but even before that on 9/11 in New York City, at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009 and at the Boston Marathon in 2013.
Yet, when we first heard "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head," terrorism had been around for years. At the time, it especially manifested itself as aircraft hijackings, or skyjackings. The Chattanooga airport even became involved in one in 1972 when a hijacked Southern Airways flight landed at Lovell Field to pick up ransom money.
Today, we shake our heads at mass murders, half of us blaming the proliferation of guns and the other half of us blaming the people with the guns and the culture that brought those people to the desire to use one in such a deleterious way.
But when we watched Butch and Sundance pick up Sundance's lover, Etta Place (played by Katharine Ross), and flee to Boliva, we had come through - only three years earlier - Richard Speck's brutal mass murder of eight student nurses in Chicago on July 14, 1966, and Charles Whitman's mass slaying of 16 - 14 from the University of Texas bell tower in Austin - on Aug. 1, 1966. And we would hear, only three years later, of the slaying of 11 members of the Israeli team at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, West Germany.
Today, some states move to legalize marijuana, but all 50 continue to suffer from the wide interstate transmission of drugs, from homemade methamphetamine creation and from teenage pill swapping parties.
But just two months after "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" was honored with the most Oscars at the 1970 Academy Awards, a movie was released - to which all young teens and pre-teens were dragged as a precautionary measure - that portrayed youth gangs and the heroin habit that had captured one of the gang member's girlfriends. "The Cross and the Switchblade" starred Pat Boone and a young Erik Estrada and convinced all baby boomer parents that drugs were everywhere.
Today, the Internet, movies, cable networks and even network television offer up, in content and number, sexual fantasies that defy the imagination.
Yet, when Butch and Sundance were jumping into the river, Playboy had long been in existence, and a film rated X (now NC-17), "Midnight Cowboy," was on its way to winning the Academy Award for Best Picture.
The bottom line is not that it's never really been the good ol' days but that we're responsible for making our own good ol' days.
Don't like Obama? He'll be gone in a year. In the meantime, vote for a candidate you believe measures up to your standards.
Don't want more terrorism, mass murders, drugs or pervasive pornography? Work for candidates whose plans you believe can end them. Don't live in fear. Teach your children the dangers of drugs and a healthy respect for sexuality.
And if you choose to watch "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" in the theater, remember you can put your own butter on your popcorn, and you can concoct your drink with root beer, light lemonade and lime cola. You couldn't do either of those in 1969.
These are the good ol' days. It up to us to make sure of them.