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RAT FINK Big Daddy Roth VW BUS Hot Wheels Hall of Fame
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RAT FINK Big Daddy Roth VW BUS Hot Wheels Hall of Fame
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YOU ARE BIDDING ON AN UNOPENED MINT CONDITION 1:64 SCALE ED - BIG DADDY ROTH'S RAT FINK VW BUS CREATED BY HOT WHEELS FOR THE PETERSEN MUSEUM & THE HOT WHEELS HALL OF FAME "1 OF 5000"
Ed “Big Daddy” Roth was one of the most important and colorful personalities of 1960’s pop culture. A popular car customized and designer, Roth created his alter ego character “Rat Fink”, who was emblazoned on everything from clothing to coffee mugs. The Petersen Museum worked with Hot Wheels and the estate of Big Daddy and invited Rat Fink to decorate this custom ‘60s VW Bus. This custom classic is lowbrow and waaaay cool PLEASE GIVE IT A GREAT HOME!!! NO RESERVE!!!! Few car cult figures are as renowned as Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. Born in Beverly Hills in 1932, Roth came of age in post-war Southern California, the cultural epicenter of hot rodding. During the 1960s, Roth was a celebrity, a larger-than-life character with a beatnik beard who spoke in hep-cat lingo and was always hamming it up for the camera. More than his contemporaries Von Dutch and the Barris brothers Sam and George, Roth grasped the marketing potential of the trappings of the custom car counterculture and understood how to promote them to teenagers. During the mid-1950s, Roth established his reputation as a pinstriper and painter of scallops and flame jobs. He opened a successful custom paint shop called the Crazy Painters with fellow pinstriping artists “Baron” Crozier and Tom Kelly. Yet, while his brand of custom pinstriping was an important part of the 1950s car scene, it soon became apparent that the form of art did not have to be reserved exclusively for automobiles. In the late 1950s, Roth began running advertisements in Car Craft and Rod and Custom magazines offering what he called “weirdo shirts.” For about four dollars, Roth would hand airbrush the name of your car club on a sweatshirt along with a grotesque head covered in pustules or surrounded by flames—a “weirdo.” The cover of the April 1961 issue of Sports Illustrated featured two hot rodders, backs to the camera, showing off their Weirdo Shirts—high fashion in the Southern California street racing scene. By 1965, Roth traded his airbrush for a silkscreen, turning the counterculture craze for customized shirts into a profitable, mass-market enterprise. In 1959, Roth left the Crazy Painters and opened Roth Studios at a nondescript little building at 4616 Slauson Avenue in Maywood, a suburb of Los Angeles. Through the following decade Roth and other talented artists such as Ed Newton, Robert Williams, and Dave Mann, were able to push the envelope of car customization thanks in part to the development of fiberglass, which could be easily molded into extreme shapes. Roth also conceived a highly recognizable corpus of automotive and monster iconography that was printed on shirts, decals, and virtually anything else that could be sold by mail-order or at car shows. The 1960s came to be the high point of Roth’s career and his entrepreneurial activities. The vehicles that he produced and the monsters penned by the studio artists under his direction are what he is best remembered for. Few could have predicted the market potential for T-shirts depicting cars driven by monsters. In his survey of mid-‘60’s American culture, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Tom Wolfe quotes Roth’s summation of the inspiration behind his T-shirt designs: “A teenager always has resentment to adult authority. These shirts are like a tattoo they can take off if they want to.” Most historians credit Roth with popularizing the printed T-shirt. Today such silk-screened shirts are so ubiquitous that many do not realize that t was a time before Roth when all T-shirts were plain. Of all the creatures conjured by Roth, Rat Fink was the most popular. Widely regarded as the alter ego of Disney’s world-famous Mickey Mouse, Rat Fink was the archetypal Roth monster. He was fat, hairy, homely, sweaty, and had bloodshot eyes and a twitch, yet is credited with selling the most Roth T-shirts. Capitali... 
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