![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I put the initials RF on the pot belle, er … chest … to symbolize his nutty name. After that, the drawing of Rat Fink just oozed from the pencil. “Up to then I had not the foggiest idea of what I was gonna draw so I quick put two eyeballs down first & then the jagged teeth. Sitting in a diner “back in the ’50s, I think,” Roth started doodling his warped, devolved counterpoint to Mickey Mouse on a greasy napkin: It feels more like sitting down with the guy and letting him ramble for a few hours than reading an autobiography.Īlmost right off the bat Roth clues us in to the real Rat Fink origin story. ![]() Roth makes no real attempt at a coherent narrative here, or even a logical timeline-it’s pure stream of consciousness, so gonzo it’s probably all true. It turned out to be of the more interesting automotive-related books I’ve ever read, and it's the closest I’ll ever get to burrowing into the head of one of the car world's most out-there icons.Įd Roth with the Druid Princess. My dad bought the book, originally published in 1992, some years ago, and at some point I stole it from him. He made some cool cars, for sure, but what relevance did a wacky well-nigh undrivable showpiece like Mysterion really have to me? As a kid I thought his slavering, power-shifting monsters were creepy and that Rat Fink was kind of gross, which is probably all the proof you need to know I was born a total square.īut awhile back I pulled Confessions of a Rat Fink: The Life and Times of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth off my shelf. It’s hard to imagine, say, the late George Barris going anywhere with so little pomp and such a deficiency of circumstance.ĭespite my young brush with kustom kulture greatness, I don’t think I really understood Roth growing up. I’ve seen junk-sellers at Hershey with more elaborate setups-and probably bigger crowds around them. There’s something really humble about this whole scene, what with the mighty Rat Fink himself hawking trinkets out of a tent at an out-of-the-way Midwestern car show. We should have had him pinstripe the Little Red Wagon-that would have been really cool to have. We roll up to a pop-up canopy with folding tables piled with pins, gewgaws and, naturally, T-shirts-lots and lots of T-shirts.Īnd there’s an old guy, Roth, I presume, underneath or around the canopy selling his stuff. I almost certainly wanted to be somewhere else. Only, I do sort of remember it-one of my earliest glimmers of memory, in fact-or at least my brain is doing a good job weaving a plausible reconstruction out of scraps: It would have been a hot summer day, and I was (I think) riding in a Little Red Wagon. Ignace Car Show in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and I would have been too young to remember any of it. It would have been in the early 1990s at the St. Feel free to poke around the site and view the many forms of Rat Fink art.As family lore has it, I met Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, car customizer and weirdo underground artist extraordinaire, once. Rat Fink Art comes in all shapes and sizes, from YO-YO’s to Halloween masks, posters to shirts. Roth should either have been canonized or smothered at birth. Depending on your age, sex and mechanical inclinations, “Tales of the Rat Fink” will convince you that Mr. “Cars should have personality,” he tells us, in a tone that suggests he’s struggling to locate his own. Roth in “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”) and Ann-Margret, while a strangely listless John Goodman serves as the voice of Mr. Roth, who died in 2001, might have found a tad cutesy - is an appropriately eclectic bunch of celebrities, including Tom Wolfe (who celebrated Mr. Lending their voices to the cars themselves - a trick Mr. More instructive about the obsessions of teenage boys than the allure of steel and wheel, “Tales of the Rat Fink” punctuates Michael Roberts’s Rat Fink Art with eyeball-searing animation, a haphazard selection of old newsreels, photographs and automobile ads. I’ll bet Donald Trump wishes he had thought of that one. Roth’s lucrative idea to paint hideous monsters - including the Rat Fink Art - on children’s T-shirts, a sartorial trend that, in the 1960’s, had the added benefit of getting their wearers of Rat Fink Art banned from school, thus giving them more time to play with Mr. Ogling fins and drooling over fenders, the movie traces the colorful history of the hot rod from speed machine to babe magnet and, finally, museum piece and collector’s item. ![]()
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