By Alex Symcox and David Chodosh

Ed “Big Daddy” Roth in his natural element: the junkyard. Roth was always clowning for the camera.
Photo collection of David Chodosh

Few car cult figures are as renowned as Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. Born in Beverly Hills in 1932, Roth came of age in post-war Southern California, the cultural epicenter of hot rodding. During the 1960s, Roth was a celebrity, a larger-than-life character with a beatnik beard who spoke in hep-cat lingo and was always hamming it up for the camera. More than his contemporaries Von Dutch and the Barris brothers Sam and George, Roth grasped the marketing potential of the trappings of the custom car counterculture and understood how to promote them to teenagers.

During the mid-1950s, Roth established his reputation as a pinstriper and painter of scallops and flame jobs. He opened a successful custom paint shop called the Crazy Painters with fellow pinstriping artists “Baron” Crozier and Tom Kelly. Yet, while his brand of custom pinstriping was an important part of the 1950s car scene, it soon became apparent that the form of art did not have to be reserved exclusively for automobiles.

In the late 1950s, Roth began running advertisements in Car Craft and Rod and Custom magazines offering what he called “weirdo shirts.”  For about four dollars, Roth would hand airbrush the name of your car club on a sweatshirt along with a grotesque head covered in pustules or surrounded by flames—a “weirdo.”  The cover of the April 1961 issue of Sports Illustrated featured two hot rodders, backs to the camera, showing off their Weirdo Shirts—high fashion in the Southern California street racing scene. By 1965, Roth traded his airbrush for a silkscreen, turning the counterculture craze for customized shirts into a profitable, mass-market enterprise.

The Business of Monsters

Roth’s first fiberglass bodied custom, the Outlaw brought him national recognition in the custom car scene. Noted collector Bruce Lustman donated the iconic car to the Petersen Automotive Museum in 1999.
Collection of the Petersen Automotive Museum

In 1959, Roth left the Crazy Painters and opened Roth Studios at a nondescript little building at 4616 Slauson Avenue in Maywood, a suburb of Los Angeles. Through the following decade Roth and other talented artists such as Ed Newton, Robert Williams, and Dave Mann, were able to push the envelope of car customization thanks in part to the development of fiberglass, which could be easily molded into extreme shapes. Roth also conceived a highly recognizable corpus of automotive and monster iconography that was printed on shirts, decals, and virtually anything else that could be sold by mail-order or at car shows.

The 1960s came to be the high point of Roth’s career and his entrepreneurial activities. The vehicles that he produced and the monsters penned by the studio artists under his direction are what he is best remembered for. Few could have predicted the market potential for T-shirts depicting cars driven by monsters. In his survey of mid-‘60’s American culture, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Tom Wolfe quotes Roth’s summation of the inspiration behind his T-shirt designs: “A teenager always has resentment to adult authority. These shirts are like a tattoo they can take off if they want to.” Most historians credit Roth with popularizing the printed T-shirt. Today such silk-screened shirts are so ubiquitous that many do not realize that there was a time before Roth when all T-shirts were plain. 

The Original Rat Fink

Ed poses with the Outlaw and a Revell scale model of the car.
Photo collection of Verne Hammond

Of all the creatures conjured by Roth, Rat Fink was the most popular. Widely regarded as the alter ego of Disney’s world-famous Mickey Mouse, Rat Fink was the archetypal Roth monster. He was fat, hairy, homely, sweaty, and had bloodshot eyes and a twitch, yet is credited with selling the most Roth T-shirts. Capitalizing on the popularity of his creature, Roth had his studios artists create dozens of Rat Fink-esque creatures, an army of monsters stuffed into stylized renderings of hopped-up Fords and Chevys. School-aged boys loved them; their mothers hated them.

Roth had many versions of the Rat Fink creation story.  In his 1980 autobiography Confessions of a Rat Fink: The Life and Times of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Roth states that he first doodled Rat Fink on a napkin at a restaurant in about 1960. Although the first to admit he was no great artist (at least with a pen), Roth was very pleased with his drawing and the repulsive little character had personal significance to Roth. “Whenever I looked at that drawing,” Roth said, “I felt I was looking, for the first time, at reality—my reality. The world that my parents, teachers, and responsible type people all around me belonged to wasn’t my world. Why did I have to be like them, live like them?  I didn’t. And Rat Fink helped me realize that.”

The Cars

Despite the fame and fortune afforded Roth by his mail-order monster shirts and decals, they were all secondary endeavors meant to finance his true passion: building custom cars. Roth’s first car was a customized 1934 Ford Coupe, which he modified and pinstriped just like all subsequent vehicles he owned. Imagining ever more outrageous customs, he realized his ultimate automotive fantasy in 1959 when he fabricated a vehicle almost entirely from the ground up.

Roth’s first scratch-built vehicle began as a custom-made frame into which he fitted a potent 1949 Cadillac overhead valve V-8 engine. To create the body, Roth laid fiberglass over a hand-carved plaster form, sculpting a unique custom body with swooping, fanciful lines. Known today as the Outlaw, the vehicle was first dubbed Excaliber (spelled incorrectly by Roth).Thanks to a revolutionary new material called fiberglass, Roth was able to create a wild custom that looked like no production vehicle before or since.  Although Chevrolet had built Corvette bodies with fiberglass since 1953, it was still a relatively new material whose applications had not been fully explored. By pioneering the use of fiberglass on custom cars, Roth demonstrated that it was possible to create designs that were not limited by the uniform shapes of factory-built body panels.

Roth first used the handle of a sword as the Excaliber’s shifter before replacing it with a more conventional shift knob in 1960, at which time he rechristened the car Outlaw. It was featured on the cover of Car Craft in January 1960, and immediately propelled Roth to star status on the custom car scene. Car-show audiences were mesmerized.

Beginning with Outlaw, every Roth creation was featured in a publication like Car Craft or Rod and Custom. These magazines brought Roth and his creations to a national audience consisting of individuals who also purchased the Roth Studios products advertised within those same magazines. Through the early- to mid-1960s, Ed Roth rode a wave of financial success built on his celebrity, his custom cars, and the counter culture T-shirts and decals produced by his studios.

The cockpit of Rotar (The Roth Air Car) was a tight fit, especially for its creator Ed Roth. Powered by two Triumph motorcycle engines, and weighing 750 pounds, Rotar was able to hover several inches off the ground. A Roth Studios promotional postcard optimistically claimed “there is a remote possibility that this will be the first car to reach the MOON”.
Photo collection of the Petersen Automotive Museum

Many of those who grew up in the 1960s remember the model kits produced by Revell that were miniature replicas of Roth vehicles for which Roth licensed his name. Acting upon Revell’s suggestion that he needed a more memorable name, Ed Roth added the words “Big Daddy.”  Much to the delight of custom car fans that were too young to drive, each new Ed “Big Daddy” Roth car (and a series of other fanciful designs as well) could be purchased as scale models. Roth claimed Revell paid him two cents for each model sold. Although a seemingly small amount of money, Roth says it “kept the bucks rollin’ in for years.” The October 1964 issue of Life magazine put sales of Revell’s Roth models at three million units for that year alone. 

A year after building Outlaw, Roth unveiled the Beatnik Bandit. Featuring an aircraft style bubble-top canopy, the Beatnik Bandit was a sleek roadster with a fiberglass body, built on an Oldsmobile chassis. Continuing the jet-age aviation theme, Ed created a single “joystick” control for the car that incorporated steering, acceleration, and braking. The Beatnik Bandit appeared in Car Craft in May 1961. In 1962, Roth built Rotar (for Roth Air Car), a bubble-topped fiberglass vehicle that, much to the amazement of car-show-goers, was not a car at all, but an aircraft. Rotar hovered on a cushion of air produced by the downdraft of two large fan blades, each of which was powered by a 650cc Triumph motorcycle engine.

Roth’s Mysterion debuted in 1963. Built on a custom frame, Mysterion was an experiment in asymmetrical design. One year later, Roth introduced the Road Agent, which until then was a slang term for a bounty hunter or hit man.  A 1960 Chevrolet flat-six Corvair engine powered the mid-engine, bubble-topped roadster. Between 1964 and 1968 other Roth cars followed in rapid succession, including Orbitron, Surfite, Druid Princess, Bike Truck, Wishbone, and Yellow Fang.

In Tom Wolfe’s celebrated narrative The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Roth is quoted as saying, “Detroit is beginning to understand that there are just a hell of a lot of these bad kids in the United States and they are growing up. And they want a better car. They don’t want an old man’s car.” Roth was building the counter-culture cars for those Detroit neglected.

The Demise of Roth Studios

As the 1960s came to a close, Roth saw his success begin to wane. He blamed the Beatles for the decline of hot rodding and custom car culture believing that “guys were spending more money on music—records and guitars and sound equipment—than they were spending on cars.” Although he continued to sell monster shirts and Revell-licensed models to kids across America, Ed Roth shifted his creative direction.

Roth poses with the staff at Revell, all wearing his Mr. Gasser T-shirt. Revell paid a licensing fee to use Roth’s name and many of his characters and also encouraged him to add the “Big Daddy” to his name. Roth claimed Revell paid him two cents for every model they sold.
Photo collection of the Petersen Automotive Museum

Having already experimented with building a small number of custom trikes, Roth moved away from V-8 powered customs to more economical vehicles powered by Volkswagen, and, later, Honda engines. He saw a future in smaller, more fuel-efficient customs, but because most popular periodicals did not normally cover diminutive three-wheelers, Roth self-published Choppers Magazine from 1967 to 1970 in order to spread the word about his activities. His publication showcased the trikes and custom motorcycles that he hoped would appeal to the rebellious side of motorcycling. But after numerous squabbles with members of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang at his studio, Roth decided to leave the business that he founded. He sold the assets and closed both Roth Studios and Choppers Magazine in 1970 and returned to custom painting, taking a job alongside Von Dutch as a pinstriper, letterer, and sign painter at Movie World in Buena Park.

Seeking new meaning in his life, Roth converted to Mormonism in 1974. He looked back on the 1960s and regretted selling ugly monsters to children, endorsing unlawful street racing, and exposing himself to harm through confrontations with dangerous thugs. Yet, Roth never stopped building custom vehicles, and turned out numerous trikes such as Globehopper and Rubber Ducky and smaller creations like Conestoga Star (a motorized Radio Flyer wagon) and Finkmobile (a tiny five-wheeler with seating for one). By 1983, he had reconciled his past with his faith and began printing T-shirts again. He also self-published books on painting and working with fiberglass.

Endowed with an unremittingly youthful spirit, Roth captured the imagination of millions of young Americans during the 1960s who, as adults today, fondly remember his legacy: monsters and wild cars that captured their imaginations. Beginning in 1977 at Movie World, Rat Fink Reunions have brought together Roth fans and fanatics, and even Ed Roth himself. Once disdained, his vehicles are now carefully preserved and command prices that Roth would have thought absurd. 

Long Live Big Daddy

Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s work rapidly found a following among the very young. Everything he created, from his cars to his monster T-shirt designs, had elements of fantasy, rebellion, and cartoon-like playfulness.
Photo collection of David Chodosh

For many years the arts that Roth embraced (drawing cartoons, pinstriping, and sculpting fiberglass) were not appreciated in the mainstream art world. His style of low-brow art with its working class roots, focus on individualizing mass produced products, and garish and grotesque anti-authoritarian aesthetic, was never fully accepted. But during the last two decades, the talents displayed by Ed Roth and his counter culture collaborators have become the focus of museum exhibits and art auctions. Ed “Big Daddy” Roth died in 2001, but his works live on to remind us of an important period of social change, and inspire those who seek to embrace their own spirit of nonconformity.