Cooper Baskett embodied Jack-Jack from the movie “The Incredibles 2” as volunteers at Shriners Hospitals for Children in Salt Lake City transformed his wheelchair into the Incredimobile. Mimicking a fight scene with a raccoon from the movie, Cooper, 3, put his fists up as he delighted in the attention.
“This is something he gets to have all his own,” said his mother, Tonya Baskett, as they got their first look at his Halloween costume. Cooper, who has skeletal dysplasia, doesn’t get to run around like his cousins, which usually makes the holiday difficult. However, this year the whole family plans to dress up as characters from the same family of superheroes.
For the third year in a row, Shriners put on a costume clinic to trick out and transform the wheelchairs for kids. In its first year, the volunteers helped eight children. On Wednesday, it was 28.
Volunteers tried to cater to the desires of each kid, crafting costumes out of cardboard, fabric, PVC pipe, paint and foam.
Gathered under seven canopies, crews worked on the chairs of four kids throughout the day, with a two-hour window for each transformation.
With a little bit of advance planning, the teams were ready for each kid turning their chairs into Batmobiles, monster trucks, cupcakes, princess carriages, Millennium Falcons, pirate ships and fighter jets.
Employees with Spirit Halloween, a costume retailer, volunteered during last year’s event and saw the need for wheelchair costumes. This year, the company helped craft four costumes.
One of those was a monster truck assembled around Jonathan Clark, 6, who has cerebral palsy. His dad, Jeremy, who’s in the process of adopting his fourth child with special needs from Bulgaria — was excited to watch his son’s eyes light up. Jonathan, who is part of a special needs baseball league in West Jordan, will get to move around in his new wheels for the upcoming showcase indoor baseball game. Clark said: “It will be cool to see him run the bases in a monster truck."
