![]() ![]() Crump, however, went straight to the top. When Crump showed the design to his boss, Dick Irvine, it was marked for reassignment. Crump dreamed up a design, inspired by the art of Mary Blair, that was full of movement – numbers that looked caught mid-twist, and a face made of sun-like circles that was frozen with a delirious grin. The timepiece is the anchor of the facade of Disneyland’s It’s a Small World. That’s just the way it was.”Ĭrump’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. You just looked at something and knew Rolly drew it. “He did these really sexy girls in very exotic sketching – pen and ink type stuff. Gurr immediately became a fan of Crump’s art and today owns some of Crump’s original “dopers.” Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland, with Crump touching up some of the small red devils in the final scenes. Gurr, 91, said he met Crump when the two were working on minor refurbishments in the 1950s for Mr. “He had a way of doing outrageous art,” says retired Disney theme park designer Bob Gurr, known for conceptualizing many of Disneyland’s ride vehicles, including the original monorail. On such designs Crump’s exuberant line work and use of color feels free and loose, the illustrative equivalent of jazz improvisation. His love affair with music was deeply present in his art, be it his buoyant portraits of jazz artist Josephine Baker, which were heavy on curves and ovals, like musical notes in flux, or the packaging he designed for Ernie Ball’s guitar strings. A comic strip-inspired 1967 poster for the psychedelic rock group the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band belongs to the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. ![]() Crump hung the latter in the animation department’s library, where he sneaked in what he called his “dopers,” that is, art that humorously celebrated drugs in the style of Beat generation barroom posters (“Be a man who dreams for himself,” read a painting cheerleading opium).Ĭrump continued to work on eccentric Pop art throughout his career at Disney. While in animation, the Alhambra-born artist surrounded himself with small but personal art projects – outlandishly painted rocks with beatnik-era slang and mini propellers and mobiles. Yet his striking personal style, a brash use of color and a zest for the counterculture, not to mention a gutsy, determined drive, served Crump well. He worked primarily as an assistant to animation master Eric Larson and could spend the better part of a year on laborious but difficult tasks such as drawing the flexible dots on Dalmatians. His freewheeling, cartoonish drawings were more fit for a tattoo parlor than the mature works the esteemed animation house was seeking to create.Īlthough his animation credits – “Peter Pan,” “Lady and the Tramp,” “Sleeping Beauty” and “101 Dalmatians” – include some of the medium’s foundational texts, Crump wasn’t a star in the department. 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.Ĭrump lacked a college degree, and his high school portfolio was untamed when he joined Disney’s animation department. The Disneyland Hotel’s wildly popular bar Trader Sam’s is steeped in the Crump influence. ![]()
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