Big Daddy Roth
| Ed Roth | |
|---|---|
Ed "Big Daddy" Roth in La Mirada, California, 1987
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| Born |
Ed Roth March 4, 1932 Beverly Hills, California, United States |
| Died | April 4, 2001 (aged 69) Manti, Utah, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Self-educated |
| Known for | Hot rod art, customizing and pinstriping |
| Notable work | Rat Fink among others |
| Movement | Kustom Kulture |
Ed "Big Daddy" Roth (March 4, 1932 – April 4, 2001) was an artist, cartoonist, illustrator, pinstriper and custom car designer and builder who created the hot rod icon Rat Fink and other characters. Roth was a key figure in Southern California's Kustom Kulture and hot rod movement of the late 1950s and 1960s.
Roth was born in Beverly Hills, California. He was the son of Marie (Bauer) and Henry Roth. He grew up in Bell, California, attending Bell High School, where his classes included auto shop and art.
Roth is best known for his grotesque caricatures — typified by Rat Fink — depicting imaginative, out-sized monstrosities driving representations of the hot rods that he and his contemporaries built. Roth began airbrushing and selling "Weirdo" T-shirts at car shows and in the pages of Car Craft magazine as early as July 1958. By the August 1959 issue of Car Craft "Weirdo shirts" had become a full blown craze with Roth at the forefront of the movement. The article featured Roth along with fellow Kustom Kulture pioneers Dean Jeffries and Pete Millar. Inspired by Roth and Barris Kustoms (whose shirts were airbrushed by Dean Jeffries), Detroit native Stanley Miller, a.k.a. "Stanley Mouse", began advertising his own shirts in the pages of Car Craft in January 1961. The lesser-known Rendina Studios of Detroit and Mad Mac of Cleveland also joined in on the monster "weirdo" shirt craze, but Roth was certainly the man who widely popularized the "Monsters in hot rods" art form.
In 1959 Roth created The Outlaw. This fiberglass Kustom hot rod was featured in the January 1960 issue of Car Craft. The car was covered in Car Craft and Rod and Custom, and appeared at custom car and hot rod shows. Other hot rods include The Beatnik Bandit (1961), The twin Ford engined Mysterion (1963), The Orbitron (1964), and The Road Agent (1965) among others. In 1965, Roth's surf buggy, the Surfite was featured in the film Beach Blanket Bingo starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, and also in Village of the Giants, featuring Beau Bridges and Tommy Kirk. One of Roth's personal drivers was a tangerine orange 1955 Chevy 2-door post with a Ford 406 cu. in. engine under the hood...he drove this car to his shop every day for years .
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Wikipedia