His life was intertwined with cars and pop culture from the beginning: His father worked as a limousine driver for silent film star Mary Pickford. Roth was born March 4, 1932, in Beverly Hills to German Lutheran parents. He took what he inherited from Von Dutch and, between them, they created an American art form.” “But he got absolutely no academic recognition. “He was a very singular figure and probably one of the best-known American artists in the country,” Robert Williams, who worked as Roth’s art director from 1965 to 1970, said Thursday. In the last two decades, as art museums and other institutions have begun taking a closer look at pop culture, Roth and his peers gained more respect from the academics who had long dismissed their works as lowbrow. His fans admired the energy and anti-establishment attitude he carried throughout his life. “I know what I am,” Roth told The Times in 1973. The company canceled his contract in 1967. Revell, however, lost its love for Roth when he began hanging out with members of the Hells Angels as his interest in customizing motorcycles grew. Roth, who was 6 feet 4, mentioned that he had been called “Big Ed” in high school, so the publicist suggested “Big Daddy,” which Roth loved.
It was a Revell publicity man who came up with Roth’s nickname after telling him, “We can’t put ‘Beatnik Bandit by Ed Roth’ on the box.” The Revell company sold millions of Big Daddy Roth model car kits, from which Roth received a royalty of 1 cent each. The character’s wise-guy, street smart attitude lives on in such descendants as Bart Simpson, Ren & Stimpy and the foulmouthed “South Park” kids.
Rat Fink’s sinister glare, razor-sharp teeth and bulging, bloodshot eyes became ubiquitous on T-shirts, posters and car decals in the ‘60s. Roth developed Rat Fink in the ‘50s as the underground culture’s response to Mickey Mouse. “His stuff was all outrageous,” said Dick Messer at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, where the Outlaw car now resides. Nora Donnelly, who organized the “Customized” exhibition for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where it premiered last fall, said: “An enormous amount of people have been influenced by him, in the hot rod art world as well as in the contemporary art world.”
“He and Von Dutch and Robert Williams represent the trio of legendary figures who really shaped the aesthetics of hot rod culture and the art that came from it.” “He really is the Big Daddy,” Fleurov said. His influence on the culture of Southern California was huge, said Ellen Fleurov, museum director at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido, where Roth’s works are on display in “Customized: Art Inspired by Hot Rods, Lowriders and American Car Culture.” He had first gained fame with the Beatnik Bandit in 1958 and a fiberglass hot rod called the Outlaw in 1959. In fact, Roth had been at work Wednesday morning on the latest in a long line of custom vehicles. The cause of death had not been determined, Chodosh said Thursday, but he said Roth had been in good health. Roth’s wife, Ilene, found him dead Wednesday in his workshop near their home in Manti, Utah, said his business associate and friend, David Chodosh. It is also thought to have been a toned-down form of 'ratfucking,' a slang term for playing dirty tricks.Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, the sign painter turned car designer whose outrageous automotive creations and grungy cartoon alter ego, Rat Fink, made him an outlaw icon of Southern California pop culture of the 1950s and ‘60s, has died. The term fink was originally underworld slang for an informer, comparable to 'stool pigeon', and ratfink is an intensified version of 'fink.' By the time Roth used this name for a character, the term had started to pass into more general usage. The Rat Fink is a green, depraved-looking mouse with bulging, bloodshot eyes, an oversized mouth with yellowed, narrow teeth, and a red T-shirt with yellow 'R.F.' on it.Ī Rat Fink revival in the late 1980s and the 1990s centered around the West Coast punk/grunge movements. 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. After he placed Rat Fink on an airbrushed monster shirt, the character soon came to symbolize the entire hot-rod/Kustom Kulture scene of the 1950s and 1960s. Roth's hatred for Mickey Mouse led him to draw the original Rat Fink. Rat Fink is one of the several hot-rod characters created by one of the founders of Kustom Kulture, Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth.