Popular Cal Poly’s 75th Rose Parade Float Set to Wow with Shock and Awww!

Cal Poly universities’ 75th entry in the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day is sure to be another crowd-pleaser, featuring giant manta rays and electric eels, and honoring the parade’s theme for 2024: “Celebrating the World of Music.”

The 55-foot-long float, titled “Shock n’ Roll: Powering the Musical Current,” will depict a rocking swim party on a coral reef. Led by a 16-foot purple manta ray, the float will showcase a trio of eels supposedly providing current to the musical instruments on board. 

The 2024 float also showcases a colorful seafloor adorned with starfish, anemones, urchins, and a super-sized clam housing a phonograph. A piano keyboard swirls around the back half, adding to the musical ensemble.

The float is a joint effort of student teams from the California State Polytechnic University in Pomona and Cal Poly.

“The team was very interested in the idea of a universe in which animals and instruments evolved alongside each other in an underwater environment,” Quinn Akemon, Cal Poly Rose Float president in San Luis Obispo, said. “We really wanted to emphasize the idea that the instruments and animals were sharing a community and had developed a symbiotic relationship through music. 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.”

Since their first entry in 1949, the combined team has won a total of 61 awards, including the 2023 Extraordinaire Trophy for the most extraordinary float measuring 55 feet or larger.

A statement by Cal Poly said the process of designing and constructing the float involves fabricating, building, adjusting, and fine-tuning mechanical systems, as well as welding structural supports and shaping design elements. The student teams also test decorative materials and perform sheeting and foaming before adding the final design elements.

Both the Pomona and San Luis Obispo campuses of Cal Poly each play a role in the float construction. The Pomona campus traditionally builds the front half of the float base, while the San Luis Obispo students handle the back. Design elements are shaped by both teams, and they come together in Pomona later in October to integrate the float’s two halves.

This year, the students are excited about creating a new animation system to control the float’s movements. 

“Revamping the system that electronically controls our float mechanisms will improve the ease of programming and give us more opportunities to improve our animations,” said Brooke Handschin, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student and the Pomona team’s construction chair. “If we are successful with the new system, we have the possibility of synching our animations to the music on our float.”

The student teams will continue building the float throughout the fall, balancing their studies with the project. After finals, they are expected to make a significant push right up until the floats are judged the day before the parade.