you cant take the led marquee home with you as easy, and if you did, it wouldnt look as cool on your bedroom wall.
but if you do work at a theatre that doesnt have them computerized and they have to set them manually, you can do cool stuff like changing the names of movies like WHAT WOMEN WANT: THE JAMES HAMMONDS STORY.

What sixplex in San Jose? AMC Oakridge?

Meridian Quad 6. (If you all find it funny that a sixplex is called 'quad',it's because Blumenfeld added two more screens to the original 4-plex and decided to keep the name.) Had to be one of the uglier plexes with the HUGE numbers in the first 4 auditoria (reversed on the left side, even) I think Scott [Neff] has pics of the place somewhere.

When I did my time at Hollywood Video, I somehow landed the job of updating the signage every couple of weeks.* One week I found a particular poster to be hung and knew exactly where to put it.

The marquee it went in was right underneath our large "HOLLYWOOD VIDEO" sign... the poster:

BURN HOLLYWOOD BURN

I still kick myself for not getting a picture of it in the two weeks it was up.

-Tw?

*Outside signage is fun: you're supposed to get up on a ladder and wet down the whole window with a sponge to make the vinyl stay up, but that was a bit messy. So eventually someone ran across the street to the Target and bought one of those giant Super Soakers. Outside signage went from a 30 minute task to 10 minutes.

Ian - you're paying $15-20/mylar???

As for outdoor maquees, the Wagner-Zip type letters are very common, but they are often difficult to change, sometimes dangerous as prevously stated, letters inevitably get broken, words truncated or mispelled, and they are absolutly no fun to change in bad weather. Also the flourescent tubes have to be periodiclly changed out depending on the hours that the marquee is lit. Nothing lasts forever.

We are a military theater at a northern base in Japan. The weather here is almost never perfect and the winters are long. We are presently using the Bevelite slide-in lettering system. But they stick in the ice and snow and in the spring duststorms the silk screen markings are abraded off.

I have researched the WWW and there are many firms that provide LED signboards but they seem to all either be the very small, like in the lobby type or the overly huge type like you see in Vegas or along the highway. Nothing in between. Surely somebody makes something like this. We can get these here in Japan but we would have to pay two arms and two legs for it. Our budget is not limitless.

Can anybody out there point me towards a company that could satisfy our requirement? Sure would appreciate it.

Trans-Lux services a lot of the industry.
Electromedia might be another possibility. I'm sure there are others.

Have you considered making weather shields? These are clear plastic panels hinged above the line of letters that normally are about an inch in front of the marquee. When changing the marquee, the catches are released and the sections lift up. The size of the panels can't be too large or they act like sails in the wind, and there must be a positive method of securing them at the bottom.

The idea might not fit your situation, but I remember wanting to do something similar on a couple of marquees where windblown snow got into the BEV-AD tracks and froze the letters to the tracks.