For impressionable kids of the early 1960s, one of the gatekeepers to the simmering counterculture was rot rod pioneer Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. Ed combined souped-up cars, surfing, and bug-eyed monsters to create t-shirts and model kits of intoxicating vulgarity. His signature cartoon character, Rat Fink, was a revelation for misfit children confused by their own disenchantment with The Wonderful World of Disney. The jittery, fly-covered rat was the sort of crude scrawl the kids might draw themselves, only to have the art confiscated by a disapproving teacher or scout leader. Junior may not have understood that Roth’s ludicrous hot rods and drooling monsters hinted at an unwholesome underworld of sex and drugs, but Mom and Dad sure did. Like Bill Gaines, Soupy Sales, and Elvis before him, Ed Roth was a decidedly Bad Influence who created a rift between thrill-seeking youth and their conformist elders. “How can they say Rat Fink is wrong”, they asked, “when it feels so right?”
In addition to warping America’s children with demented cartoons (paving a direct path to the underground comics of the hippie era), Ed inspired a DIY movement among car enthusiasts. Not satisfied with simply pimping old Model T’s, he made innovative use of fiberglass to craft unique body styles, designs which won acclaim with hotrodders and model kit builders alike. His early masterpiece, the Beatnik Bandit (shown above), even featured a joystick of his own invention which controlled the steering, acceleration, braking, and transmission all in one. At his most ambitious, Ed even built one car, Rotar, which levitated on a cloud of air. Above all, he encouraged sheer aesthetics as well as horsepower in the art of the hot rod. As Ed himself would say, “Looks bad…is bad.”
- A.H.
(And let’s not forget Ashley’s website, jam-packed with portraits and other drawings, his highly-affordable prints and books currently available, his eagerness for your portrait commission, and his contact email, thrdgll@gmail.com, where he longs to hear from you.)
I was there. Sometimes vulgarity is heroic, trashiness is epic, adolescence is eternal. Big Daddy was the synergism of all three. Warhol was a boring fraud. Big Daddy was the high-amperage king of pop anti-culture. In a thousand years, when the biologically engineered mutants who inherit the earth wanna know what it was like, back in the day, they will stand around a glass case enclosing one of Big Daddy's plastic hot-rod monsters, painted in sloppy enamels, and say "Now, I get it"....
And Big Daddy's monsters didn't just sit there with a bone in their teeth, they were manic. They had the forward momentum of wrecking balls. Hand on the shift, pedal on the floor, grinning like the gates of hell, running over granny and stray dogs with joyous, glorious insanity....
JDA
I built all of these kits when I was a kid. Loved them to death and even saw a few of the full size versions at the Detroit Auto Shows back in the day. The notorious Red Baron replete with its chrome-plated Nazi helmet and mounted machine guns was at one of the shows for all to admire.