Big Daddy Roth, Rat Fink and Cult art from the 60's and 1970's.

As a boy age 9 or so you had to have the tee-shirts, the Revell models of the hot rods and a box of extra model parts. The box of parts contained alternate body parts and chrome for customization of the engines. You built your models, destroyed them, used the parts to design new ones and dwelt in a realm of car racing fantasy.

Rat Fink was one of my favorites. He was associated mostly with the fastest muscle cars and the funny cars. I mowed lawns for the comic books featuring Ed Roth, Robert Williams and several others.

What I didn't know back then was I was only a vulture of America's most independent form of art. I wish I had managed to save some of my collection from then but life is not that giving. I did however save the memories of a boy age 9 to about 12 and the influence those great days brought me.

This my friends is American art, it's what defined an era of creation and inspired young kids all over to get interested in creating something out of what was available.

Below is a quote and after that a movie. More after the movie. I hope you read some of it.

"From the award-winning director of Comic Book Confidential and Grass comes TALES OF THE RAT FINK, Ron Mann's wildly inventive bio about Renaissance man Ed Big Daddy Roth, who engineered a shift in mid-20th century culture with his customized cars, monster T-shirts and America's alternative rodent, Rat Fink."

Following is from Wiki's site [here].

Ed "Big Daddy" Roth (March 4, 1932 – April 4, 2001) was an artist and cartoonist who created the hot-rod icon Rat Fink and other extreme characters. As a custom car builder, Roth was a key figure in Southern California's "Kustom Kulture"/Hot-rod movement of the 1960s. He grew up in Bell, California, attending Bell High School, where his classes unsurprisingly 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. Although Detroit native Stanley Mouse (Miller) is credited with creating the so-called "Monster Hot Rod" art form, Roth is accepted as the individual who popularized it. Roth is less well known for his innovative work in turning hot rodding from crude backyard engineering, where performance was the bottom line, into a refined art form where aesthetics were equally important, breaking new ground with fiberglass bodywork.

In the 1960s, plastic models of many of Roth's cars, as well as models of Rat Fink and other whimsical creatures created by Roth, were marketed by the Revell model company.

Numerous artists were associated with Roth, including painter Robert Williams, Rat Fink Comix artist R.K. Sloane and Steve Fiorilla, who illustrated Roth's catalogs.

Roth was active in the field of counterculture art and hot-rodding his entire adult life. At the time of his death in 2001, he was working on an innovative hot-rod project involving a compact car planned as a radical departure from the dominant "tuner" performance modification style. In his later years, Roth's telephone number was listed in the directory, and he encouraged fans to contact him: he was always generous with his time and enthusiasm.

A Roth custom feared lost for many years was the subject of a number of articles in automotive enthusiast magazines in the summer of 2008. The Orbitron, built in 1964, was discovered in Mexico in late 2007. The car, in dilapidated, inoperative condition, had been parked for quite some time in front of an adult bookstore in Ciudad Juárez. The owners of the shop were also the owners of the car. It was purchased by Michael Lightbourn, an American auto restorer who did extensive business in Mexico and who in turn repatriated the car to the United States. The Orbitron has since been restored to its original condition by present owner Beau Boeckmann.