Kid's Drive-In Movie

My wife was planning a movie night for our kids one Saturday night. Since we lease our building out on Saturday nights, we couldn’t have it at our main building. We typically have these events at our Kid’s Day Out (mother’s day out) facility. There is a large fenced in playground area in the back yard. We had normally had movie nights in doors, but this time, we wanted to move it outside.

My wife had bought a blow-up movie screen from Amazon.

Here's the screen we bought from Amazon: MEGA SCREEN MOVIE SCREEN - INFLATABLE PROJECTION SCREEN- PORTABLE HUGE OUTDOOR SCREEN - Over 9' DIAGONAL    Note:  Amazon no longer carries the exact one we used.  This is a similar product.  But this one has great reviews also...

This thing was awesome. It blows up nice and tall and makes a great surface to project on. We used an older projector, DVD player, and a home amp and speakers to bring it to life.

As we were sitting up, we had to move all of the ride-on vehicles out of the way to make room. Then we had a thought. What if we took all of the ride-on toys and put them in front of the screen. Sorta like a drive-in movie. So we arranged the Cozy ride-ons to look like a drive in.

Here's some of the many Cozy Ride-On vehicles available from Amazon:

Little Tikes Princess Cozy Truck Ride-On

Little Tikes Princess Cozy Coupe Ride-On

Little Tikes Cozy Coupe Tikes Patrol, Ride-On

Little Tikes Cozy Coupe 30th Anniversary Car

Little Tikes Cozy Coupe Sport Ride-On

Little Tikes Ride & Rescue Cozy Coupe

Little Tikes Cozy Truck

The Original Ride On Toys-The Cozy Coupe - Little Tikes Cozy Coupe 30th Anniversary Car

Little Tikes Cozy Coupe Off-Roader Ride-On, Camo

The more varied the cars are, the better.

Check out the picture.



 

It was really funny watching the kids show up that night. They just walked in, found the car they wanted, opened the door and got in. Nobody had to explain how it worked.

We just walked around handing out popcorn and juiceboxes.

Now, I’ll admit that we ran into a little issue. It had to get pretty dark before the movie looked really good. We had one of those $300 projectors we were using, so we couldn’t get it bright enough. If you waited until the correct time of year so the got darker earlier or if you have a better projector, you’d probably be in better shape.

We had a projector similar to this one (they no longer sell the one we have):

BenQ DLP HD 1080p Projector (TH670) - 3D Home Theater Projector with 3,000 ANSI Lumens and 10,000:1 Contrast

This would work fine if it starting to get dusk.  But if you are wanting to be visible in sunlight, you'll need a much brighter projector.  Of course, now you are getting into expensive projectors.  And if you are spending a ton of money on a projector, you probably don't want it outside being exposed to the elements.

As far as sound goes, moving the home audio equipment was a pain.  If I had it to do over, I would probably invest in a portable sound system.  Something like:

JBL EON206P Portable All-in-One 2-way PA System with 6-Channel Mixer

for a nice system you can use other places.  Pretty much for any outdoor event (unless it is a very large venue).

Or something like this, which is much cheaper, but not quite as flexible:

ION Audio Tailgater (iPA77) | Portable Bluetooth PA Speaker with Mic, AM/FM Radio, and USB Charge Port

 

Let me know what you think. And as always, send me your pics of similar things…

 

Update: 09/13/2017 - I found a few more pics....















Of course we had to bring in the snow cone truck.  Or technically the snowball truck...