Each Float’s a Rolling Theme Park Attraction

A goofy, smoke-snorting, 30-foot-tall dragon will huff and puff La Canada Flintridge’s sailboat float down Colorado Boulevard in the Rose Parade, but its audience probably can’t imagine the heart beating under its yellow-chrysanthemum scales.

The float driver, Dustin Crumb--a mechanical engineer by trade--looked at the cheek-puffing, eye-rolling dragon a few days ago and heaved an affectionate sigh. It has the heart, he said, of “an industrial robotics workshop.”

“Just Imagine,” aptly enough, is its title and, like most of the other 52 floats in Pasadena’s 113th Tournament of Roses, it’s a marvel of technology under a fragrant patina--sure to stir wide-eyed wonderment among kids and world-class engineers alike.

“There’s more and more progress every year in terms of . . . more technical elements in the floats,” said Joel Burdick, a professor of mechanical engineering at Caltech who’s been enthusiastically squeezing his way curbside every New Year’s Day for 13 years to take in the Southland’s always impressive display of magic through technology.

Rose Parade floats have come light-years since the bouquet-bedecked shays of 1890. They need two--even three--internal combustion engines to power computerized animation programs and stadium-sized sound systems.

A few, like the dragon, will billow with clouds from theatrical smoke machines, and one will even belch propane-fueled fire. It won’t be long, leaders of the float-building industry believe, before they’ll race to the next level--giant figures with the sophisticated animation of today’s most lifelike robotic figures seen on Hollywood movie sets.

“I’d say those are right around the corner,” said Tim Estes, president of float construction firm Fiesta Parade Floats in Duarte. “All we need is a sponsor with the money.”

Big Size, Big Sound and Big Animation

Burdick said floats had their last big technological leap within the last decade as they rolled out show-stopping packages of big size, big sound and big and complicated animation.

“I remember one float had a giant race car lifting its front end, and with a 3,000-watt sound system, I knew it was carrying a lot of energy aboard,” Burdick said.

At Phoenix Decorating Co. in Pasadena, President Bill Lofthouse said the largest floats weigh up to 30 tons--about the same as 125 Chevy Suburbans--only two tons of which is floral decorations. The rest is the quarter-inch-steel and plywood frames, and two or three V-8 engines.

Cooling all those engines is always a challenge, as overheated engines are the leading cause of float breakdowns, said parade float Chairman Gary DiSano. But this year, the tournament also is looking closer at another potential overheating hazard--a driver breakdown.

Float construction Chairman Myron Yanish said every driver’s compartment this year will be equipped with an electronic temperature sensing device taking a minute-by-minute reading. The findings will be analyzed to see if more ventilation fans or cooling systems should be added for future parades.

Most of the floats in Lofthouse’s fleets will roll on tires filled with dense rubber foam so they won’t go flat. But once while convoying his floats on New Year’s Eve to the parade route 20 miles away, Rick Chapman at the Festival Artists company in Azusa, found that the foam-filled tires overheated and fell apart. This year he’ll just use air.

GPS Transponders Used to Track Floats

The process of convoying floats from several locations gave rise to another innovation--global positioning system transponders will be on the floats headed to the staging area, and their positions tracked on computer displays from a communications trailer.

“It used to be when it was 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning and somebody’s float wasn’t here, we’d have to go driving around looking for it in the dark,” said Yanish. “This will save a lot of time.”

As recently as the 1960s most of the animation still was being done by hand--or foot, recalls Dick Gillespie, one of the top animators in float building today. Gillespie said the first float he worked on was a giant stagecoach in the early 1960s that carried cowboy movie stars Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.

“We had a kid inside pedaling a bicycle with the chain turning the stagecoach wheels,” Gillespie said. “It was done with levers and poles. There were a lot of people under the float . . . and you couldn’t get them coordinated very well, most of the time.”

He recalled motorized animation began taking hold in the mid-1960s, and sequential animation--which performs a routine rather than a single movement--followed about a decade later. Gillespie recalls a giant clock he created for a Union 76 float, with a mechanical boy and girl hitting a bell with hammers and rack of giant animated smoking pipes. Chapman, another longtime float builder, recalls in the mid-1970s fabricating a giant hydraulic-powered rabbit that appeared to hop down the street.

Chapman said the hydraulic revolution swept through in the early 1980s after the tournament first allowed floats to exceed 17 feet, 4 inches in height--the safe clearance under the Foothill Freeway crossing over Sierra Madre Boulevard. It takes large hydraulic systems to lift tons of float to full height--and retract to pass under the freeway.

In the last decade or so, advances in hydraulic technology allowed what amounts to rolling theme park attractions.

Gillespie’s hopes for an animation prize this year are riding with the Farmers Insurance Float, “Help Is on the Way,” featuring a pair of giant winged horses that seem to be pulling a chariot high above the crowd. Gillespie captured video images of galloping horses to program the leg movements.

The parade’s animation trophy last year was Fiesta Parade Floats’ entry for Glade air freshener, which had 56 animated elements depicting a fanciful machine whisking flowers on a conveyor belt into a gizmo that created a literal breath of fresh air--a device pumping floral fragrance at the crowds,

This year, Fiesta’s Estes said, he’s banking on the Dr Pepper float to win that trophy. The float depicts a rock band of six 9-foot-tall cavemen and two mammoths. He said it took him about 20 hours to animate the figures, imprinting multiple hydraulic valve operations into an industrial robotics program, and synchronizing the movements to a 2 1/2-minute soundtrack.

Ivan Beardsley of Los Angeles, a past president of the American Society of Interior Design, said nothing prepared him for the overwhelming experience in helping judge last year’s entrants.

“It’s amazing when they get all the animation going, it’s really quite phenomenal,” he said. “When the music is going and you capture all the emotion of the people who put their hearts and souls into the floats, I was standing there with tears running down my cheeks.”

David Barrington Holt, creative services director at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop in Burbank, which has worked on floats for the Macy’s parade in New York, knows robotic animation well. He enjoys showing clients the life-size, animated snowman head that the shop created for the 1998 movie “Jack Frost.” The snowman talks, winks, laughs, looks around, smiles, frowns--all synchronized to a voice track.

And that snowman head is exactly the nexus of the next leap in technology for the Tournament of Roses, said Burdick, the Caltech professor.

“You can have a 50-foot Statue of Liberty or Santa Claus performing like Mr. Lincoln at Disneyland, it’s feasible even today to imagine something like that,” Burdick said. He sees two obvious limitations: time and money.

Whereas today’s larger animated floats in the parade cost $300,000 to $400,000, Burdick calculated that future, fully animated floats might cost $7 million to $10 million--considering the costs of any first-time venture.

“But,” he added, “it’s probably a decade or two before the cost comes down to where a normal sponsor would be willing to cough up that kind of money--where you’re talking a million or more.”

At Fiesta Parade Floats, Estes was intrigued with the idea of a project of that size.

“With Mr. Lincoln, Disney can have 2,000 square feet of hydraulics under the floor, and doesn’t have to cover him with flowers, and doesn’t have to move him down the street,” Estes said. “But if somebody comes in here and is willing the spend the money--I think it would be fun.”