Petal to the Metal

When hundreds of volunteers show up today to begin pasting flowers on Burbank’s entry in the 109th Rose Parade, float co-designer Lynette Ecklund will be there to gently guide thousands of sticky fingers.

“I am a big texture fan,” Ecklund said recently as she worked in the Burbank float barn, her practiced eye surveying the 55-foot-long “Mama’s Day Off,” on which a giant bear snoozes while his boisterous cubs tear through the living room.

“Whether I’m decorating a house or a float, I like to play with textures. Here, Papa Bear will be hairy. His pillow will be made of carnations, so it will be soft and fuzzy, and the toy blocks will look hard.” She added that the bear will be covered in brown cocoa palm and the blocks in a combination of blue and purple statice, carrots, celery and cornmeal.

The traditional week of fresh flowering has arrived for Burbank’s float, one of six representing San Fernando Valley businesses and communities in the 1998 Pasadena parade, whose theme is “Havin’ Fun.” The others are sponsored by the city of Glendale, 20th Century Insurance Co. of Woodland Hills, Countrywide Home Loans Inc. of Calabasas, Sunkist Growers of Sherman Oaks and International House of Pancakes Inc. of Glendale.

Like the others, Burbank’s float encapsulates Southern California panache with its flowery elegance and high technology. A lot of the expertise that went into its design and animation was supplied by men and women in the entertainment industry. Ecklund, for example, is a freelance designer of Hollywood creatures who was a puppeteer in DreamWorks’ film production “Mouse Hunt.” But far more viewers in one sitting--an estimated worldwide TV audience of 425 million--will see her rambunctious bruin clan.

The bears’ heartbeats were supplied by a crew led by float construction chairman Steve Edward, manager of computers for Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank.

“It’s kind of an interesting diversion. I play with computers all day, then I come down here and work on the hydraulic system,” Edward said, pointing out hundreds of yards of snaking oil lines that will help send a gleeful-looking cub swinging around like a fuzzy tether ball from a 23-foot-tall floor lamp.

*

*

Equipped with powerful generators and intricate hydraulic valves that provide animatronic figures with smooth, fluid movements, today’s floats more closely resemble theme park attractions on wheels.

“Floats are becoming more and more sophisticated,” said Joel Burdick, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Caltech.

There are even several computerized floats, such as Countrywide’s “Rock Concert.”

Joe Rando of Rando Productions of Burbank said it took him 16 hours to create a computer program to synchronize a band of swaying dinosaurs who perform to a three-minute rock medley.

“It’s all just laying down tracks,” Rando explained. “You start with the soundtrack, then rehearse the dinosaurs until they do what you want, then you hit the record switch.

“But I don’t think people care about how it’s done,” he added. “They just want to enjoy the floats for what they are.”

The dinosaurs and bears will be in a procession of 54 floats to be led by Donna Shirley, who led America to another planet as manager of the Mars exploration program at the Jet Propulsion Lab, located within a few miles of the parade route. Shirley will ride on the first float in the parade, 20th Century Insurance’s “Fantastic Journey,” along with astronauts Norman Thaggard, Bruce McCandless II and Edward G. Gibson.

“A good float rider has to have an ability to smile and wave for 5 1/2 miles,” Shirley joked. “It’ll be quite a physical challenge. At least Norm’s a doctor in case any of us fall over.”

The drivers of the giant Sunkist entry, a 98-foot-long Macarena-dancing caterpillar, will also face a challenge, said Chris Lofthouse, vice president of Pasadena-based Phoenix Decorating Co., which is building 24 of the floats in this year’s parade.

The float has four engines: one for propulsion, two to animate eight sets of waving arms on the towering worm, and one more to drive a generator serving a stadium-quality sound system to blast spectators with the Macarena.

“Driving this is going to be like driving a tank,” Lofthouse said, tapping a knuckle on one of its 9-foot-tall wheels.

The huge wheels dwarf Sunkist employee Irene Pinsky of Van Nuys, who spent a recent Saturday afternoon sticking white rice on them, fulfilling the rule that the floats be covered with organic material. “If this glue gets in your clothes, give it up, because you’ll never get it out,” she said.

“Years ago, it was hard to get people to do this,” said Paul Sherrod of Agoura Hills, Sunkist’s volunteer coordinator who rewards his assistants with parade and Rose Bowl game tickets. “But the word has spread that it’s really fun, so a lot more people have been showing up.”

Even so, for Pinsky, 800 fellow Sunkist employees and their friends and relatives who have helped decorate the float, the real payoff is found on a curbside on New Year’s Day. “I like to watch them go by so I can say, ‘I did this part and I did that part,’ ” she said.

A little unabashed hokeyness still drives a lot of Southlanders to pitch in on the show seen around the world.

That holds especially true for the community floats such as Glendale’s, a 35-foot entry featuring an RV-sized teapot with a theatrical smoke machine to simulate steam, “Tea at Grandma’s House.” Grandma will be portrayed by Marilyne Wiechmann, a 37-year Glendale resident who had wished to march in the Rose Parade when she was a majorette at Rosemead High School.

But now, joining six others on the float, Wiechmann said her float’s theme reminds her of the most important bit of advice handed down to riders over the years: “Don’t drink too much coffee beforehand.” She’ll be riding because her husband, Nelson, a concrete contractor, bid $1,100 for one of the six seats on the float at a fund-raising auction by the Glendale Rose Float Assn.

*

*

Meanwhile, a spunky 11-year-old, Amanda Grace Lee of Richardson, Texas, will be riding on the Glendale-based International House of Pancakes entry because, in the best tradition of the Hollywood myth machine, she had the chutzpah to enter and win a nationwide float-design contest, besting 20,000 other youngsters.

“I wasn’t going to enter at first,” Amanda confessed. “But then me and my friend Lauren started brainstorming--you know, coming up with ideas--and she thought of catching frogs. Well, I kind of liked that idea, so I borrowed it from her.”

IHOP’s float is titled “Catch’n Frogs,” and Amanda will be sharing a moment on the stage with half a dozen animated amphibians.

If fake frogs represent one end of the 1998 Rose Parade’s technological spectrum, the giant robot dog on Edison International’s electrically powered float, “Our Science Project,” stands at the other. The dog will carry a solar-powered camera along the parade route that will snap pictures that will be beamed to Edison’s Web server via cell phone and posted on the World Wide Web.

But even that feat pales next to float builder Lofthouse’s ultimate dream: a robot float that will walk the parade route on its own, on the scale of a $9-million, 3.6-ton, six-legged vehicle that Ohio State University-based engineers developed for the Defense Department in the 1980s.

“Walking vehicles have been done, but somebody will have to come up with a lot of money to make one big enough for float size,” said Lofthouse, who has been in the float business for 18 years. “But it’ll happen some day. Maybe my son will be the one who does the walking float.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

FYI Volunteers are needed to apply fresh flowers to the floats at the following locations:

* Countrywide, 20th Century--Fiesta Parade Floats, 1727 S. Buena Vista St., Duarte.

* Glendale, IHOP--Rose Palace, 835 S. Raymond Ave., Pasadena.

* Sunkist--Rosemont Pavilion, 700 Seco St., Pasadena.

For information, call (626) 449-7673.