Rolly Crump

But staying on the topic of incredible people and connections.

What has it meant to you personally to hear that Jesse Cole and the Savannah Bananas consider the wisdom of Walt almost like a team Bible? And as you've had the opportunity to collaborate with amazing individuals like Rolly Crump, Bob Gurr, Tom Morris, those are some big names.

How have those relationships shaped your journey and the impact of your

work? It's crazy.

That's great stuff.

All right, Jen, we good? Make sure you got everything you wanted.

Well, do you want to take a moment and talk about those wonderful gentlemen on the screen collaborating with Rolly Crump, Bob Gurr, Tom Morris?

I am a college administrator.

Well, in 1959, when Disneyland had its second grand opening with the debut of the Matterhorn Bobsled, Submarine Voyage, and Monorail, several significant improvements were made to Snow White and her adventures.

Yale Gracie and Rolly Crump led the team upgrading the attractions.

They would later work together on designs for the Haunted Mansion, which we were just talking about.

The upgrade included new mechanical witch figures, individual lighting for the trees of the dark forest, several repainted sets, and sound effects for many of the elements of the adventure, including a new voice for the witch.

It also displayed backyard luau packs, matchbooks, and other things from their own personal collections.

On the right, you can see the elaborate entrance to the museum, and in the middle, we have Rolly Crump, the legendary Disney Imagineer, who l- uh, lent a lot of support to Kevin Katie and-- Kidney and Jody Daly, as well as Bosco.

And so with this being the first exhibit, I think this is a, a prime example of just trying to get it back in front of the people again and trying to get it in the popular mindset.

I talked about this a little bit ago, but this is the newspaper article where the quote from Tony Ramos came from.

So he's the Disney animator, um, like, that the sh- you know, he conceived all of the s- like sketched out so many of the concepts for the Haunted Mansion that we talked about earlier.

Then in the bottom left is labeled Brother Roland for Rolly Crump.

He's one of the Imagineers who pumped out 100-plus ideas for Haunted Mansion, including the Museum of the Weird that we talked about last episode.

Um, and then finally on the bottom right is labeled Uncle Blaine for Blaine Gibson.

Marc Davis was brilliant at character and visual comedy.

Then you have Yale Gracey developing illusions, Rolly Crump producing wonderfully bizarre designs, including concepts for the never realized Museum of the Weird, and X Atencio helping pull the attraction together through dialogue, story, and music.

So essentially you have all these people approaching the Haunted Mansion from a slightly different direction, and somehow that becomes its greatest strength because the finished attraction doesn't really commit to being horror, and it doesn't commit to being comedy either.

It starts creepy, then it gets supernatural, and then it just gets ridiculous, and by the end, ghosts are having a party in a cemetery.

Now, um, I will tell you this: I could not have been more impressed with either this tour guide or Disneyland or the person who wrote the script and Disneyland didn't pay close attention or run it by Imagineering or, I don't know what happened.

But this guy said, and we're talking about Rolly Crump and his Museum of the Weird, for some reason that's what they wanted to talk about, and then... or in the script.

And then he said, a- um, he was trying to talk about how Rolly Crump's ideas didn't really make it into the Haunted Mansion except for this and that, and, um, a drawing he drew of a man-eating plant that became the wallpaper that you see in the Haunted Mansion.

Full stop.

That's all he said about the wallpaper.

But I mean, because what I'm trying to say is she has a very important story that should be, people should be asking her about that.

Like, you went with Walt.

Rolly Crump did not travel with Walt Disney places to, to decorate his park.

But underlying all of it is really what kind of drove me to kind of get into attractions and kind of continue here was Imagineering and WDI and that kind of experience.

and I was just completely just consuming all of the books and literature I could buy, folks like Mike Sklar and Rolly Crump and all of that, because I was so in love with the world that they had created.

And Disney do a great job of letting their folks write about this and document this with a memoir.

Steve Alcorn's books, I absolutely consumed all of those.