Tut Tut, just a tad excessive?

LOS ANGELES is reputed to have few peers at cranking out hype, but Florida’s Fort Lauderdale has out-Sphinxed L.A. when it comes to promoting King Tut.

Other than the big gilded image of the Boy King that decked the LACMA West building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” resided for six months ending last month, the museum employed fairly muted and decorous messages to lure 937,613 people to the show.

Floridians face a rather more in-their-face marketing attack. Tut on parade -- aquatically. Tut at the movies. Tut at the mall. Tut with a new advertising alias: “The Original King of Bling.”

“We thrive on tourism in Fort Lauderdale,” explains Lynn Mandeville, director of community affairs for Tut’s next abode, the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale. “We knew it was something too big and too important for us to hold too closely. We want to reach out to folks.”

The “King of Bling” moniker, coined by the local tourism bureau, is on billboards in Atlanta; Orlando, Fla.; and New York’s Times Square. Mandeville says trailers for the Tut show will run on 187 screens of a Florida movie chain. The museum will open a satellite gift shop, full of Tut paraphernalia, at the Galleria at Fort Lauderdale -- along with a booth where mallgoers can buy tickets without paying the usual handling charge.

And the theme of the city’s annual Winterfest Boat Parade, a 10-mile jaunt along the Intracoastal Waterway by decorated vessels, is “Jewel of the Nile” -- meaning that the Dec. 17 event aims to put its expected 850,000 spectators in an ancient Egyptian mood as well as a holiday spirit.