Cal Poly unveils ‘rockin’ swim party’ design for new Rose Parade float. Take a look
Cal Poly has unveiled its design for its 2024 Tournament of Roses Parade float.
This one features a “rockin’ swim party” with colorful manta rays and electric eels jamming out to music, the San Luis Obispo university said in a Friday news release.
The 55-foot-long float, called “Shock n’ Roll: Powering the Musical Current,” depicts “a universe in which animals and instruments evolved alongside each other in an underwater environment,” Quinn Akemon, Cal Poly Rose Parade Float president, said in the release.
“The instruments and animals were sharing a community and had developed a symbiotic relationship through music,” Akemon explained. “The animals provide power to the instruments through electricity, and the instruments play music that flows through the scene and brings the community together in song.”
The project honors the 2024 Rose Parade’s theme of “Celebrating the World of Music,” according to Cal Poly.
The 2024 float design includes a 16-foot purple manta ray swimming above “a rockin’ swim party on a coral reef,” the news release said.
Rose Parade attendees can also expect to see “a 27-foot vibrant yellow eel powering a guitar while his eel friends bob to the beat,” the release said. “Two enormous manta rays glide over a colorful seafloor studded with starfish, anemones, urchins and a super-sized clam, that contains the phonograph. A piano keyboard swirls around the back half adding to the music ensemble.”
The Cal Poly campuses in San Luis Obispo and Pomona each have teams of about 30 students who collaborate to design and build the float. Traditionally, Cal Poly Pomona builds the front half of the base of the float, while San Luis Obispo students build the back half.
In October, the teams will meet in Pomona to unite the two pieces.
Once assembled, the float will measure 55 feet long, 23 feet high and 20 feet wide, according to Cal Poly.
This year, students are redesigning the animation system that controls movements of objects on the float.
“If we are successful with the new system, we have the possibility of syncing our animations to the music on our float,” Brooke Handschin, a mechanical engineering senior and the Pomona team’s construction chair, said in the release.
The Cal Poly team has won 61 awards since the two universities submitted their first combined float in 1949, Cal Poly said.
In 2023, Cal Poly won the Extraordinaire Trophy.
“Between interesting mechanism development, exciting decorations materials and larger-than-life eels, rays and instruments, this will definitely be a float to remember,” Akemon said.
The annual Tournament of Roses Parade will be held on New Year’s Day — Jan. 1, 2024 — in Pasadena.
