Rolly Crump, Disney designer who helped define the look of Disneyland, dies at 93
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.
Crump received his big break at the Walt Disney Co. in 1952, when he was 22.
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 would later laugh, recalling — with swagger — that he was once told, "What you showed us was the worst portfolio of anyone ever hired in animation."
Crump would go on to become one of the most important artists to work for the Walt Disney Co.
It's a Small World, the Enchanted Tiki Room and the Haunted Mansion are just a few of the projects Crump would contribute to once he joined Walt Disney Imagineering, known as WED Enterprises (for Walter Elias Disney) in 1959. With Imagineering, the division of the company that oversees Disney theme parks, Crump's designs would help define the look of Disneyland. The Anaheim park has been replicated in Florida and around the world and remains the backbone of Disney's empire.
Like all of the core early stylists of what would become the great American theme park, Crump had never built a theme park before Disneyland. "Everything was so goddamn naive," Crump once said, alluding to the fact that he carved the tikis of the Enchanted Tiki Room with plastic forks from the Disney commissary. The tikis still stand in the park today, and Crump's designs — tiki gods and goddesses such as Pele, a fire goddess, and Hina Kaluua, a mistress of rain — continue to shape and influence tropical art.
The Disneyland Hotel's wildly popular bar Trader Sam's is steeped in the Crump influence. It was designed in his vision of tiki culture, which was based on weeks of research aided by anthropologist Katharine Luomala's book "Voices on the Wind." And to this day, Crump is heralded as co-leading what would become Disneyland's greatest version of Tomorrowland, a sort of mod vision of future-past that opened in 1967.
Crump lacked a college degree,
