Today's Rabbit Hole: Nickelodeon

I say again: Nickelodeon.

Ask anyone you meet if they've heard of Nickelodeon and you will hear a resounding yes. But that word, that name, it's so odd. We name our items, places, ideas after other things from history more often than not. We pick family names for our children. We name estates after the people who built them. But where in tarnation did a name like Nickelodeon come from??



In an effort to flesh out my Bujo/TN with my book/TV/movie collections, I wanted to set up a page where I listed movies I wanted to see, but how to go about picking the first ones to watch was beyond me. I use the ToDoMovies app on my iPhone, but old movies, I mean the really old ones... Well, they just aren't listed there. There's no way to list all movies by year in the app, and unless you know the name of a movie or the name of a person associated with the movie as director, producer, or actor, the app is useless to discover old movies.

So I went to Wikipedia.org, loathe as I am to use it as a resource, but on the other hand, you can get a lot of good information on where to get good information through the links at the bottom of each page. I like old movies, so trying to find a list of the first movies, I came across the lovely idea of Googling "what was the first movie shown in theatres". And yes, I spell theatre the British way, regardless of whether or not it is a movie theater or a stage theatre. And no, I'm not British in any way, except many, many, many generations removed. I just like it better and both ways are correct so nyeah.

In any event, I came across an Infoplease article entitled "The First Movie Theater". It would have been nice if the link to the 1919 newspaper article would have worked, but it helped me refine my Google search. "the nickelodeon theater pittsburgh" It netted me a link to Timothy McNulty's 2005 article for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, "You saw it here first: Pittsburgh's Nickelodeon introduced the moving picture theater to the masses in 1905".

What's in a name? Nickelodeon was named thus because the owners charged a nickel and combined the price with the Greek name for a school of music [odeon], it's Latin counterpart being [odeum]. {Britannica.com article} Odeums and odeons were relatively small theatres dotting the ancient world and many were near the great and large amphitheaters already popular. A prevailing belief is that orchestral sound was difficult to hear inside the larger structures. They are also believed to be used as rehearsal spaces prior to larger events.

The Nickelodeon Theater, circa 1930s,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

So back to the first movie theater in Pittsburgh, PA, The Nickelodeon. Scholars differ on many of the details of The Nickelodeon's impact on the film industry: it may not have been the first of its kind; the names of the first two movies shown aren't correct on the plaque commemorating it's probable location; it may not have been the first to bear the name. And of course, it no longer stands. But to quote one of McNulty's sources, Michael Aronson,

"It's like saying Starbucks didn't invent coffee in a cup, so they didn't have an impact on our culture."

Fair point. I've heard people say, 'wanna go to Starbucks?' and they don't always mean 'let's go to a Starbucks'. They mean to go to the nearest coffee shop. It is of course handy that the majority of the coffee shops in urban areas are 98% of the time a Starbucks. But the point is that Starbucks has had an impact on the coffee industry in a huge way, even though they didn't invent coffee or the coffee cup, or even were the first to crossbreed or develop specific beans for flavor. In that way, The Nickelodeon Theater was probably not the first, but where they were at, what they did, the response they had from the populace, directly impacted the early film industry and led to the development of film distribution, and the film industry we have today.

What's your rabbit hole for today?