I haven't built this yet as this is one of my "to do" 2018 props. It's a rotating platform that will carry presents instead of whoville characters but the idea is the same.
The base is a round plywood platform supported by metal and the presents will be attached to the top surface. There are eight wheels and are free-spinning solid rubber tires from Harbor Freight, item#42427, which have bearings front and back thus can be held in place with an appropriate length and diameter bolt. I've made yard carts and equipment with these in the past and what I've done is weld the bolt's head to the frame I've made, slip the wheel on, then install a matching nut. I use bolts that have a smooth shank except for the end where the nut goes which ensures there aren't any threads to gall the inside of the ultra-cheap chinese made bearings in the wheels. They're not rebuildable.
The platform's frame has a center collar that will slip over my mega-tree pole, and while it looks huge in diameter it's not to scale. It's a black pipe F-F coupling 4" diameter that I machined on my lathe to get rid of the threads. It slips over 3" black pipe with a little clearance that I'll have to grease the heck out of to reduce galling.
The mega tree pipe will have to be sunk into the ground for support and the usual guy lines to hold it in place. The span of the guy lines obvious has to be further out than the diameter of the rotating base including the height of the presents, or, whoville characters in your case.
The motor I intend to use is like a wiper motor but more of an industrial version. I was afraid a wiper motor wouldn't have the torque to drive a big circular platform and I still have concerns about this motor. It's a 24V 8A motor, gives 9 RPM at the output of the built in 100:1 worm gear drive, and if the rating sheet is honest it provides 21 ft-lbs of torque. I was going to machine a hub and attach a 12T bicycle gear and drive a 53T bicycle gear using a chain giving me about a 30 second platform rotation time with (in theory) 80-ish foot-lbs of torque to spin the weight.
Feeding power will be easy because I'll be building two platforms, one to rotate as described and one on the bottom for the wheels to run on. The extension cord and the cat5 will go underneath the bottom platform and the wheels won't chew it up or chew up what I pretend is a "lawn".
Where I am totally stuck (but will figure out once I ponder it long enough) is how to pin the mega tree pole so it can't rotate instead of the platform rotating. I've thought of all sorts of ways of making it stable, one as simple as welding a horizontal metal pole to it with a ring on the end to hammer a stake through. Another option is for me to attach the platform the wheels roll on to the center pole so the rotational force is contained and not involving the ground. As I said, haven't quite figured that out yet.
