Made for the home market, this 16mm silent film by Avalon Daggett shows the 66th Annual Rose Parade in 1955. Earl Warren was the Grand Marshal that year (:41). The 1955 theme was “Familiar Sayings in Flowers”. At :49 the Rose Queen is seen. At 1:13 the Mexico float. Other highlights include the L.A. County Float at 1:30, Ohio State’s float, USC’s Tommy Trojan (2:04), Minute Maid float, and more. At 3:00 a wonderful Disneyland float is seen. At 4;12 the Post Cereal float comes by. At 5:00 a float for San Antonio is seen followed at 5:30 by a St. Louis float. At 6:12 is a wild float in the shape of a man’s head.

Interestingly, local station KTLA did color-cast the rainy 1955 Tournament of Roses Parade. It was actually KTLA’s second coverage of the parade that day – the first was from the Elk’s Club in black and white – the second, color event was this further down the parade route so that the entire parade could be repeated in color. After the announcers (including Stan Chambers) finished their black and white coverage, they were whisked by police escort to the second coverage location to repeat the same. There is no indication that in 1955 NBC repeated its first historic color coverage of the parade done in 1954. KTLA was the first West Coast station to have live color capability when they obtained two TK-40A color cameras during 1954.

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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com