![]() “Beatnik Bandit”, for example, didn’t mess around with a chopped top or cut-out roof panels, but sported instead a bubble top, a transparent hemispherical dome that looked like it had been plucked off of a cartoon flying saucer, and featured a joy stick steering control. Roth’s cars went well beyond the “normal” (if such a word can apply to the custom car culture at all) customs that had been hot rodded, painted and perhaps chopped and channeled (had their roof lines lowered and bodies set lower on their chassis). Though it features George Barris a bit more prominently than Roth, in it, Wolfe makes the insightful observation, with which I agree, that these custom cars were so radical and free form in their curvulinear molded fiberglass bodies and half inch thick hand-rubbed layers of translucent lacquer, that they transcended mere automotive customizing and ascended into the realm of modern sculpture. He became successful enough to employ other artists, like Ed Newton and Robert Williams, to produce art for him.įor a fascinating glimpse into this Kustom Kar Kulture of the early 1960’s see Tom Wolfe’s wonderful essay The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby. Roth was able to parlay his images into licensing deals for T-shirts and decals, along with merchandise like the Revell model kit versions of his show cars. Roth’s images became tremendously popular and one of his characters, the Rat Fink (image above, lower right), became a cultural icon. ![]() Most of the country was still wrapped in the warm but rigidly controlled Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet delusions of the 1950’s up until 1964 or so, when “the 60’s” started to shake things apart. horror comics, which were certainly an influence on Roth’s cartoons. It’s hard to overstate how bizarre and anti-establishment this kind of stuff was at the time Roth was working, because all of this lowbrow art, outragrously grotesque creatures and characters in films and concept art, underground comics, 60’s psychedelic art and album covers, MTV-style in-your-face TV rock, grunge and punk culture, and general acceptance of wild, anti-authoritarian behavior as acceptably rembunctious, that we take for granted as part of modern pop culture, didn’t exist yet, with the exception of certain bastions of outrageous art like the aforementioned 1950’s Mad comics and E.C. Wonderfully grotesque monsters, extended tongues dripping saliva as they trailed in the wind, bloodshot eyes bulging from their distended craniums, usually with one ungainly arm extended to crank on an improbably long and weirdly curved gear shift lever, drove nitro-burning hot rods with gleaming chrome plated engines extending through their hoods, exhaust pipes spewing white hot flames and smoke pouring off of enormous tortured racing slicks as the cars lifted themselves in eternal wheelies, feverishly screaming down Hell’s drag strip to some kind of dramatic reward or explosive oblivion. ![]() These were the drawings that turned my tender little 12 year old brain into glowing orange gook when I saw them. To support the investment necessary for his obsession, Roth would use an airbrush to draw outrageous cartoon monsters and grotesquely exaggerated cars on T-shirts at car shows and drag races. ![]() Roth was into the creation of hot rods and customized show cars, particularly using the amazing new wonder material of fiberglass, that enabled him to design free form bodies for his cars instead of just cutting into existing metal bodies. Roth was one of the seminal figures in the “Kalifornia Kustom Kar Kulture” of the early 1960’s. Mad comics from the 1950’s with the hilariously subversive art of Wally Wood, Will Elder and Jack Davis, and another was the outlandishly exaggerated, lurid and over the top monster and hot rod car art of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. One was my discovery of paperback reprints of E.C. At some point in my impressionable youth, I was exposed to certain “corrupting influences” that twisted my little brain into a fevered pop culture pretzel and made me not only want draw comics and cartoons, but draw outrageous and weird comics and cartoons.
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