RAT FINK
ED "BIG DADDY" ROTH
RAT MAN
FORDS KICK BUTT
HYDROPLANE
THE FAMILY GUY
LITTLE JEWEL
WHAT'S HE BUILDING IN THERE?
WILD CHILD
BIG DADDY
RAT FINK
SURFINK SAFARI
RPM
MONSTER SQUAD
FINISH LINE AND BEYOND
"I build the car first, then make the drawing, are you paying attention Detroit?"
- Ed "Big Daddy" Roth
RAT MAN
If Walt Disney is the man behind the mouse, then Ed "Big Daddy" Roth is the man behind the rat. Born in Beverly Hills on March 4th, 1932, Ed grew up in a German-speaking household with Gordon, his younger brother. They both grew up speaking German, but in school he learned English and how to draw. No surprise, but his favorite subjects to draw were airplanes, monsters and hot rods. One of his greatest influences was his father's strict child rearing; he built the boys a shop and gave them tools to keep them out of trouble.
FORDS KICK BUTT
Ed's father was a cabinetmaker by trade and taught the boys had to make wacky things out of wood. By 1946, Ed purchased his first car, a 1933 Ford Coupe. His love of Fords would last a lifetime with that purchase. After graduating high school in 1949, he went to college and majored in engineering so he could advance his knowledge of automotive design. Of course, his first project was his very own 1933 Ford.
HYDROPLANE
In 1951 Ed joined the Air Force, looking back on his life, you could see where this was going to lead him - cars, jet engines and engineering? Hmmm, I wonder... But things didn't advance as fast as you may think. In the Air Force he was first stationed in Denver where he learned to make maps and then in Africa and South Carolina before being honorably discharged in 1955.
THE FAMILY GUY
Ed started a family and did it with gusto, he married and had five boys and as many cars as he could muster. During this time he worked at Sears, pin stripping cars for a living.
LITTLE JEWEL
While working for "The Baron" and his grandson Kelly, Ed built his first car out of junkyard parts and newly developed product called fiberglass. Ed recalls, "In Africa I had got this fantastic idea for a fiberglass car when I saw a picture of Henry Ford beatin' the trunk of one o' his new '41 Fords with a sledge hammer and it wouldn't dent. Ya could’a knocked me over with a feather. It was also very cheap! It could also be done by people with little or no talent and I had both. It seemed too far out for my brain so I just dismissed it 'til I saw the LIFE article. In '57 I started playin' with "glas". I got some of the gooiest messes ya'd ever wanna see. My pants are always ruined by the end of each day, but in them days I'd have to throw 'em away each day. Shoes was good for about 4 days before I'd throw a coat of black paint on 'em." That first car was dubbed, "Little Jewel".
WHAT'S HE BUILDING IN THERE?
Soon his garage was his studio, anything he could imagine, he could find a way to create it. Some of his first cars were, "The Outlaw", "Beatnik Bandit", "Rotar" and "Excalibur". He entered the Excalibur in a 1958 contest at Disney. However, the car was not judged because the interior was incomplete.
WILD CHILD
"I had a few tools in them days. I had some basics like a crescent wrench and a hacksaw and a couple files. So I wired, with bailing wire, all the stuff I wanted welded and took it to a trailer place down the street where this dude named Clarence Bell welded the stuff together. Then I took it home and filed all the weld marks down and took it to the chrome shop." - Ed Roth, the early days.
BIG DADDY
With his new creations and growing fan base, Ed became Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, a hot-roddin' gear head, mad scientist, and struggling artist who financed his inventions by selling drawings and t-shirts at drag events and car shows. Ed would draw cartoons of monsters that he created and pictures of cars. But when he personally airbrushed t-shirts with the monsters driving the cars, people went crazy and would line up at his booth.
RAT FINK
Ed's most popular monster was the character, "Rat Fink". Rat Fink started as a drawing that Ed had put on his refrigerator. "Big Daddy" was a genuine genius at designing cars, but it was this cartoon rat that brought him real fame. By 1963, teenagers across America were buying Rat Fink model kits and mass-produced Rat Fink T-shirts.
SURFINK SAFARI
Ed's business was booming. He built a new shop in Maywood, California and hired several employees to keep with the demand for his custom cars and t-shirts. Revell American was a model company that produced the model car kits for "Beatnik Bandit","Road Agent" and various other model kits including "Rat Fink" and his gang of hot rodding monsters. In the year, 1963, Revell paid Ed a one-cent royalty for each model sold. Ed made over $32,000 that year from royalties alone. The math is boggling, Ed's creations had caused a mania not unlike the mass marketing of mega-hit movies like "Star Wars", but he did it a decade and half before any of that existed.
RPM
Several record albums accompanied the pandemonium. The band was called, "Mr. Gasser and the Weirdo’s", of course, Ed was the leader of the band. The songs told descriptive tales about the Rat Fink's gang, their favorite pastimes, like hot rodding and surfing. The basic message was, being a "weirdo" or a "fink" was okay and cool. A lesson many American youths never forgot.
MONSTER SQUAD
Ed and his gang also had a series of underground comic books featuring Rat Fink. Along with R.F., there was Surf Fink, Junkyard Kid, Dirty Doug, Drag Nut, Wild Child, Mother's Worry, Baja Kid, Bad Kitty and Rat Fink's main squeeze, Trixie. Together Rat Fink and Trixie had two Fink-agers, Gunther and Gretchen. They also had a dog-named Ratchet Jaw who had fleas that drove around in a Hearse and stopped at all the rest stops to picnic on Ratchet Jaws tail end.
FINISH LINE AND BEYOND
Ed "Big Daddy" Roth passed away on April 4th, 2001. Rat Fink and the monster gang have grown into rock-art icons and are now a permanent part of the underground culture. "I'd like to thank my father in heaven for the health, strength and revelation to make things possible." - Ed "Big Daddy" Roth
