Santa Ana Toys Parade Will Add Floral Floats

Santa Ana’s annual Toys on Parade, which since 1984 has featured huge helium-filled character balloons such as those in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade in New York City, has announced plans to add floral floats a la Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses.

Plans were unveiled Wednesday for this year’s parade, which will include 20 fully floral and partially floral floats, along with six character balloons depicting such familiar cartoon figures as Heathcliff the Cat, Popeye and Lamb Chop. The parade will begin at 10 a.m. on Dec. 5.

The addition of the floral floats is part of a continuing effort to build the parade into “a major regional and national event,” according to Bob Viking, hired by the city as the parade’s marketing and media coordinator.

Viking said he is negotiating with the ESPN and USA cable channels for the parade’s first-ever national TV broadcast. The event has been aired by local independent TV stations since 1984.

The city’s ambitious plans for the parade stop short of competing directly with the popular Rose Parade, which Viking called the “granddaddy” of parades.

“We’re never going to match the Tournament of Roses,” Viking said. “We’d like to be the parade that opens the holiday season. The Tournament of Roses, of course, closes the season.”

Santa Ana will require that floats be at least 30% covered by fresh flowers, with the rest covered by other natural materials: dried flowers, rice, leaves, fruits and vegetables. That makes the floats less than half as expensive as those in the tightly regulated Rose Parade, which requires that floats be 100% covered in fresh flowers.

The lower price tag will make Toys on Parade attractive to corporate sponsors that cannot afford the minimum $100,000 it takes to build a Tournament of Roses float, city officials hope. “We see ourselves as an alternative for the medium-sized companies,” Viking said.

In addition to floral floats, another new feature in this year’s Toys on Parade is a volunteer organizational structure that includes a steering committee, an executive committee and a development committee. Parade chairman David Ross, vice president and general manager of Great Western Reclamation, heads a list of representatives from local companies on the committees.

Crowds estimated at 150,000 attended the 1984 and 1985 versions of Toys on Parade, while rain cut last year’s attendance to about 25,000. The estimated TV audience for last year’s parade was 1.1 million.