William Poundstone’s Los Angeles County Museum on Fire

The L.A. Times reports that Disney and screenwriter Ahmet Zappa (son of Frank) are developing a possible movie based on the Museum of the Weird, a never-built Disneyland attraction. What was the Museum of the Weird? It was one of Walt Disney’s more personal projects, a gallery of the creepy and kooky. Against type, Disney had a fascination with death and the bizarre, and occasionally had to be talked into dialing down the gore (originally, Bambi was to discover his mother in a pool of blood). For his museum, Disney envisioned a collection of funny and funny-strange special effects and artifacts. He commissioned animation artist Rolly Crump (top) and “imagineer” Yale Gracey to design the museum exhibits.
Crump was an “in-betweener” in more ways than one. He was an assistant animator, a beatnik, a doper, and a modernist sculptor influenced by Alexander Calder. In the 1950s, while working for Disney, Crump produced satirical posters promoting jazz bands and recreational drugs. After seeing an in-house show of his mobiles and marijuana posters, Disney decided Crump was the man for the museum project. But after Disney’s 1965 death, management decided the museum was too weird for Disneyland. A few of Crump and Gracey’s designs were incorporated in the Haunted Mansion. The “stretching” Old Master paintings was Crump’s idea.
Meanwhile, Crumb designed a 120-foot sculpture, Tower of the Four Winds, for the initial incarnation of It’s a Small World at the New York World’s Fair and a modernist ticketbooth for Disneyland.
Crump’s sketches for the Museum of the Weird, intended for a supposedly irony-free audience, seem at least as engaging as the Tim Burton drawings shown at MoMA and coming to LACMA. In fact, some of Crump’s drawings could be confused for Burton’s, except that they’re about 40 years earlier and 10 percent stranger. There’s an occasional note of Lari Pittman, and Crump understood, as Ruscha would, what a creepy thing symmetry can be. As long as museums are dead set on presenting Hollywood para-art, Crump’s weirdo modernism might be worth taking a look at.