Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater Restaurant
Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater Restaurant is a table-service restaurant on Commissary Lane at Disney's Hollywood Studios in Walt Disney World, Florida. It recreates a 1950s American drive-in cinema at night, with guests eating in booths built to resemble period convertibles while a large screen shows clips from low-budget science-fiction and horror films. It opened on April 20, 1991, when the park was still known as Disney-MGM Studios.
History
The restaurant arrived as part of a group of twenty additions across Walt Disney World marking the resort's twentieth anniversary in 1991. Its immediate model was the success of 50's Prime Time Café, which had opened with the park two years earlier and shown that a restaurant built around a strong comic premise could draw crowds in its own right. Walt Disney Imagineering applied the same thinking to another piece of 1950s popular culture, the drive-in movie.
The site, on Commissary Lane next to the ABC Commissary and across from the area of Star Tours, was fitted out as a soundstage version of an outdoor cinema. A perimeter fence, a star-filled artificial sky and rows of replica cars turned an indoor room into a permanent night-time lot.
Experience
Diners are seated in booths styled as 1950s convertibles, complete with fins, whitewall-style detailing and a dashboard-like front. Most cars hold parties facing forward in rows, so conversation across a large group can be limited — a trade-off that follows directly from the cinema conceit. A smaller number of conventional tables, some with car styling at their ends, are used for larger parties and guests who cannot use the booth seating. Servers, some historically on roller skates in the manner of drive-in carhops, take orders in character as attendants of the theatre.
At the front of the room a full-size projection screen runs a repeating programme of roughly three-quarters of an hour. The loop mixes trailers and excerpts from 1950s and 1960s B-movies — titles regularly identified include Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Plan 9 from Outer Space and Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster — with period newsreels, advertisements for the snack bar and cartoon interludes. The clips are chosen for camp value rather than genuine fright, and the low lighting that suits the screen makes the room notably dark for reading a menu.
Food and drink
The menu is built around American diner food adapted to the setting: burgers, sandwiches, salads, pasta and fried appetisers, with milkshakes and sundaes prominent among the desserts. Dish names have often carried film or space references, and the menu has been revised many times since 1991, but the core of burgers, shakes and onion rings has remained consistent throughout. Lunch and dinner are served, and reservations are recommended; the restaurant has long been one of the park's most requested.
Legacy
Sci-Fi Dine-In is frequently cited in accounts of themed dining as an early example of a restaurant whose environment, rather than its menu, is the main attraction. Together with 50's Prime Time Café and the Hollywood Brown Derby, it established the pattern of dining as a continuation of the park's film-studio theme rather than a break from it.