Children worked with their parents to create cardboard cars, complete with steering wheels, lights and speedometers, to take to the drive-in movie theater Friday night at the Opelika SportsPlex.
The Opelika Parks and Recreation Department hosted its second annual drive-in movie, where community members aged 4-7 were invited to create cars and watch “Ferdinand."
“I saw it on Pinterest,” said Mandy Johnson from the Opelika Parks and Recreation Department. “It’s just for kids to come and watch a movie, decorate a car-box, sit in the box and watch a movie. I saw it on Pinterest for birthday parties and thought, that’s a neat idea we could do that at SportsPlex because we have a movie screen so we started collecting boxes.”
Johnson and her team from the Parks and Recreation Department put everything together from the boxes and craft supplies to the movie.
“The main thing is getting all the boxes together and we probably started working on that in February," Johnson said. "We go to Victory Designs and get all their old T-shirt boxes. Then we paint them and make little steering wheels for them and cut out all the wheels.”
As families began to arrive, the stack of boxes to soon become cars quickly shrank as children got to work designing and decorating their ideal cars.
Children were able to choose the color of the car, its wheels and what kind of speedometer.
From racing stripes and a number to superhero, flower and star stickers, children and the cars showed off their individuality.
Britney Chandler and her two children heard about the drive-in movie through Facebook.
“Bree [her son] is very into cars, and this is something crafty and different,” Chandler said. “I really liked that it involved them making the craft, making it before watching the movie. I didn’t tell him we were coming, he was very surprised but he really liked making the car and decorating it.”
Over 20 children attended the drive-in, double the amount from last year's inaugural event, Johnson said.
"The first one we probably only had ten kids come,” Johnson said. “I would love to see it get big where we have to do it in the gym with our huge screen, so we’ll see how it goes.”
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