film premiere at Toronto International Film Festival
An inspirational Rat Fink
Artist Ed Roth created cartoons and custom cars
Film festival flick recalls golden age of hot rod culture
Sep. 16, 2006
JIL MCINTOSH
Toronto Star
http://www.thestar.com/
http://www.thestar.com/images/thestar/img/060916_RatFink_roth_300.jpg
Best known for his Rat Fink cartoon character, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth
(shown in his Utah home in 1997) helped define the California hotrod
culture of the 1950s and ’60s.
http://www.thestar.com/images/thestar/img/060916_RatFink_Globehopper_300.jpg
Best known for his Rat Fink cartoon character, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth
(shown in his Utah home in 1997) helped define the California hotrod
culture of the 1950s and ’60s. A three-wheeled Globehopper creation
that Roth drove to Kitchener in 1987 for the Canadian Street Rod
Nationals.
A life story told by talking cars, wild cartoons and a rat: do you
think customizer and comic artist Ed "Big Daddy" Roth would approve?
The safe money says he's smiling down on it even now.
Made by local filmmaker Ron Mann (Grass, Go Further, Twist), Tales of
the Rat Fink premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last
night, starring the voice of John Goodman as Roth. Goodman narrates
the film looking down from heaven: Roth died at age 69 of a heart
attack in 2001.
After the festival, it will open Sept. 22 at Oakville's 5 Drive-In, as
well as the Varsity downtown.
With any luck, the film will heighten the general public's knowledge
of Roth, who built several famous cars and motorcycles in the 1960s
but is best known for his cartoon creation Rat Fink.
The ugly rat shows up regularly on retro-style T-shirts, and Roth
seems destined to the same fate as his late contemporary, pinstriper
Kenneth Howard, whose Von Dutch logo is popular among people who
haven't a clue who he was.
Roth was an integral part of the mythical "golden age" of hot rods,
when young men in California dropped big engines into old Ford
jalopies and took them racing on the dry lakes.
He built cars like that for a while, but in the late 1950s, he
pioneered the technique that would earn him his place in automotive
history: he created cars completely from scratch, using Fiberglas.
While other builders were using lead to form variations on existing
models, Roth was turning out offbeat, lightweight cars that looked
more like UFOs with their bubble-top canopies.
His vehicles could be driven, but that wasn't the intent; he made them
for the custom car shows that were becoming popular. His "Outlaw" and
"Beatnik Bandit" caught the attention of model company Revell, which
hired him to design plastic model kits.
Throughout the 1960s, he was one of the best-known car customizers,
especially after he was featured in Tom Wolfe's 1965 book, The
Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.
He was also a prankster with little use for rules. When Revell asked
him to dress better for his public appearances, he showed up in a top
hat and tails, which became his trademark uniform.
"I don't think he cared what people thought," says Norm Grabowski, an
actor and car builder who popularized the T-bucket hot rod on the show
77 Sunset Strip.
"I'd just done a TV show with Ben Gazzara called Run for Your Life,
and I was a Hell's Angel in it. (Roth) took me to a Hell's Angels bar
after the show and said, `Norm, Hell's Angels would like to meet you
because they saw you in that TV show.' I had to explain to these guys
that it was just TV and I'm not like that in real life.
"But he was a hard worker, and when he got on a project, he stayed on
it until it was done. He was a very deep person, and there was a lot
going on in there. He was an artist."
The custom car craze peaked in the late 1960s and, afterwards, Roth
relied mostly on his art, selling airbrushed T-shirts and paintings
(one of which sold at auction in May for $23,500 U.S.). In 1974, he
converted to the Mormon Church and began working with vehicles again.
I met him in 1987, when he came to Kitchener for the Canadian Street
Rod Nationals in his three-wheeled Globehopper. He'd planned to
display the car at the U.S. national events, but they classified it as
a motorcycle and wouldn't let it in.
When the Canadian show said yes, Roth drove from California to Alaska,
and then across to Ontario. The car had no roof, and his sole
companion was a giant rubber Rat Fink.
Roth was extremely friendly and stayed later than planned, in order
that everyone in the long lineup got an autograph. I peeked into the
Globehopper's trunk and found it full of cans of baked beans.
Roth had refused the show's offer of a free hotel room. As he did
every night, he stopped at the side of the road, ate beans for dinner,
and then slept in a sleeping bag on the grass.
Roth's influence is twofold. His futuristic cars inspired other
builders to go beyond merely reshaping existing models, and his
bizarre artwork was a driving force for numerous underground comic and
poster artists, many of whom remain popular today.
Ever the forward thinker, he was reportedly working on a radical
interpretation of a compact tuner car at the time of his death.