A Bug’s Life – Dinner & Disney Movie Night

I thought with it being summer time, the first dinner & Disney movie night I would share with you should be Summer related, so we will start with A Bug’s Life.

If you are unfamiliar with this movie, a brief summary taken from IMDb website — Every year, a bunch of grasshoppers come to the anthill and eat what the ants have gathered for them. The “offering”, as the ants call the ritual, is a part of their fate. One day in spring, when the offering’s preparation has just been finished, Flik, unliked inventor ant, accidentally drops the whole offered seeds into the river. The grasshoppers come and give the ants a second chance to collect food until fall. Flik sets off to find bugs that are willing to fight the grasshoppers (nobody expects him to succeed anyway) and, due to a double misinterpretation, returns with a circus crew, giving everybody new hope. When the misunderstanding finally gets cleared out, there is only little time left for a new plan, which has to work, or else.

Our menu for this movie night —
Oven “fried” chicken
Baked Beans
Potato Salad
Punch Bowl Cake
Gummy Bugs (we snacked on these while watching the movie)
Iced Tea or Lemonade

I was going with a picnic/BBQ type of theme. We also had red and white checkered plates that I found at a local party supply store to round out the theme.

** Recipes for oven “fried” chicken & punch bowl cake can be found in the recipe section under “dinner & Disney movie night recipes **

Have you ever done a themed dinner night? If so, what was your theme and what did you do?

What Are Dinner & Disney Movie Nights??

Celebrating an upcoming Disney trip is something we all look forward to — especially in our family!

This past December we went on our biggest Walt Disney World trip yet. We spent 11 days at WDW staying at Boardwalk Inn. Our trip covered the dates December 18-28, 2012 and included Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party, Christmas Eve breakfast at Cinderella’s Royal Table, and lots and lots of great food.

I stumbled across the idea of dinner & Disney movie nights almost 2 years ago now. I talked to my husband to see if it was something he was interested in doing as a family, and then we started them in October 2011.

So what exactly are these special movie nights you ask?? Pick a movie (we gave everyone turns at picking out movies) – some movies we owned, some we rented. Once a movie was picked, I would try to theme our dinner to the movie. For example, Beauty and the Beast takes place in France, so I would try and come up with something French. You can decorate if you would like, sometimes I did, other times I did not. Then we would watch the movie after dinner. Sometimes we would do a dinner & Disney movie night every weekend, other months we might only do 1 or 2, just depending on our schedule.

We still have dinner & Disney movie nights in our house — sadly, we do not have a family trip booked at the time, but the kids had so much fun with these, they asked if we could continue them.