Rolly Crump, an animator-turned-designer who contributed to Disneyland attractions such as It’s a Small World, the Enchanted Tiki Room and the Haunted Mansion, has died.
Animator-turned-theme park designer Rolly Crump, who was instrumental in the design of early Disneyland, died Sunday in his Carlsbad home, where he had been in hospice care, said his son Christopher. Crump was 93.Those at the animation studio liked to remind him that he was an oddball. “A diamond in the rough,” as Crump once proudly said he was labeled by a superior.
Crump lacked a college degree, and his high school portfolio was untamed when he joined Disney’s animation department. His freewheeling cartoonish drawings were more fit for a tattoo parlor than the mature works the esteemed animation house was seeking to create. “He did these really sexy girls in very exotic sketching — pen and ink type stuff. You just looked at something and knew Rolly drew it. That’s just the way it was.”Crump’s art possessed a larger-than-life whimsy and circus-like loudness, and it caught the eye of Walt Disney, who plucked Crump from animation and one day assigned him what would become arguably the most recognizable clock in Southern California. The timepiece is the anchor of the facade of Disneyland’s It’s a Small World.
“He’s all risk,” said Doris Hardoon, who was recruited by Crump in the late ‘70s for the development of Walt Disney World’s Epcot, where the two worked on the creation of The Land Pavilion. “That’s his style. The way he thinks, the way dresses, the way he talks and the way worked with all of us.” A photo from the personal collection of Rolly Crump shows him discussing the facade for It’s a Small World with Walt Disney.
Crump spoke to The Times in 2018 about, among many topics, the creation of It’s a Small World. Still an imposing broad shouldered figure in his then late-’80s, Crump was emphatic. “I had Mary’s sketches in a book and gave them to the model shop,” he said. “I said, ‘Whatever you design, make sure they look like these drawings.’ I was given the job of supervising It’s a Small World. I knew it was only going to work if everything looked like Mary Blair.
“He’s very, very, very whimsical, and had a great sense of humor,” said retired Imagineer Steve Kirk, who worked with Crump on The Land, and was instrumental in the creation of Epcot mascot Figment as well as the development of Tokyo’s DisneySea. “He had a tongue-in-cheek attitude about things. If you look at what he did for the Haunted Mansion, it’s just brilliant. I had a portfolio of his sketches that I looked at for inspiration.
“The story was [that] the person who lived in there had been an old sea captain,” Crump told The Times in 2015. “He had killed his wife, bricked her up in the wall. Then he died at sea. “Yale came up with the idea of the stretch room because we had to build the Mansion outside the park,” Crump said. “In order to get over there, you had to take an elevator down to a lower level to get underneath the railroad tracks. Yale had developed the stretch room and I did some of the original concept paintings for the room. Marc Davis came in and said, ‘I hope you don’t mind, Rolly, but I’m going to re-do the drawings because I don’t think what you did is any good.’ I laughed.
Crump left Disney in the ‘70s to start his own design firm and contributed to other theme parks, including Knott’s Berry Farm. His Knott’s Bear-y Tales opened in July 1975, and it represents a themed entertainment era when “intellectual property” wasn’t a marketing buzz phrase and a trippy ride could overflow with hand-crafted dolls created from a single haphazard sketch.
Crump returned to Disney and worked on various concepts for Walt Disney World’s Epcot, perhaps most notably helping to oversee The Land Pavilion. But where Crump went, stories follow, and his former peers often cite his cheeky office at Imagineering’s model shop. “He had always the funnest looking little spot — highly decorated,” said Gurr. “He had a medieval market umbrella, decorated with funky art.
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