Ed "Big Daddy" Roth collection online

grate collection!! man I'm a nut for anything " RAT FINK "
ED BIG DADDY ROTH lives on !!!!

 

Some of these are just down right offensive......I LIKE IT!!!

 

Was just in Kmart the other day and they have the Revell "Beatnik Bandit" model kit on sale for 14.99..

 

not sure how i missed this over the years....but thanks for taking the time to put that together....way RAD

 

Got any more Coop?

 

thanks so much for sharing!!
i always love seeing stuff from ed!!
i have been collecting a lot of pictures of Ed Roth and Von Dutch over the years which i am puttin together in an album on my facebook
i try addin a picture everyday
if anyone's interested here's a link
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.439982602719570.123812.100001235017956&type=1

 

There's one guy no ever mentions in these discussions, Dean Jeffreys. He's the second guy to paint on shirts (Von Dutch did it first). Roth was the third.

I always wondered about that progression, so I decided to ask Dean.

Me: Dean, I know that you were one of the first t-shirt airbrushers because I remember your early ads. Were you the very first?

Dean: No, there was a guy by the name of Kenny Howard in my part of town doing pin striping. We hung out a lot and I started striping cars too. I had actually learned how to do beltline striping before that, when I was stationed in Germany. This old German who had striped in German car factories before the war taught me. Back in LA after my discharge, Kenny had come up with the idea of creating designs with stripes. I got the idea of using an airbrush to paint shirts from Kenny.

Me: What about Ed Roth?

Dean: We'd never heard of him.

I am retired from 50 years of painting shirts, knew Roth from 1960, Mouse from '65 and have hung with Newton a lot. I have asked Newt about the very earliest days at Roth Studios, but he wasn't there until about '64-65 (which coincides with the time when the designs started getting a lot better). So he doesn't know the early history and that's why I went to Dean. Check out Dean's book. It's got a great photo of his early car show booth, very neat, with his custom Porsche in the booth too.

Dean is a custom car renaissance man. His concept and creation of the Mantaray is astounding for 1962 and is arguably the best showcar ever built to this day.

 

Hope nobody minds me bumping a four year old post but I've got a Roth shrunken head that's a mystery to me. I bought it 10-12 years ago off fleabay and I still don't know anything about it. The guy that was selling said he'd gotten from a buddy who'd had it since his childhood in the mid sixties. His other auction items dated from the same era so I thought it was a pretty good chance it wasn't a repop.
It's made of a wild swirled resin with a yellowed clear coat epoxy covering it. It has a close resemblance to the rubber shrunken heads you'd find at the nickel and dime stores. It's about 3 1/2" long and 2 3/4" tall. There's a single hole drilled into the very top.

Anybody seen anything like this? Thanks in advance, JohnnyA

 

You had to be there to understand this one..................

 

cool piece, JohnnyA, even without the sig, but with it... there's good chance you have a strong case in favor of it being a true Roth original. it's unique, and convincing, tho we may never know unless actual corroborating evidence comes forth. if it's fake then someone really made an effort to create a nice Roth representation, it's certainly in his caveman stylizations and the entire sig is dead on, it's a keeper either way. I'm wondering if eldest son, Howard, could have made it, tho I never heard of him being much involved with his Dad's stuff, while Dennis was (my school years buddy and probably) too young at 9 in '64 to be that perfect even tho he already had artistic talent. I hope it can be verified as the real deal, I dig it!

 

damn, Mike, I had that mag as a kid and always dug the drawing while wondering who did it, and that you took from your own v bitchen bike is a great discovery for me.

 

Coop666, a bunch of your pics have vanished...as it turns out, I, too, have a vast Roth B&W decal collection, would you be interested in reinforcements?

 

If anybody is interested,.... A very good friend of mine has a pretty large collection of Ed Roth original art, and pretty dadgumb rare memorabilia, From the one and only Ed "Big Daddy" Roth.... (It will blow your mind !) ....PM me if your "REALLY SERIOUS" !

 

cool thread.

 

While I was strongly drawn to the Revell "Big Daddy" Roth custom car and fink kits right from the start, I don't clearly remember when and where I first learned of these kits or "Big Daddy" Roth's existence. It was perhaps from an ad for one of his model kits in Boy's Life magazine in 1963 or so:



But I clearly remember looking at the Revell Beatnik Bandit model kit at the Tuckey Hardware store two blocks from my house in London, Ontario sometime in early 1964. A few months afterward I was completely knocked out when I saw the Revell Rat Fink model kit at the Coles bookstore on Dundas Street in downtown London. I bought it almost immediately, built it nicely but left it unpainted:



Later in perhaps early 1965 I bought this even wilder Revell Roth Mysterion kit that I'd been admiring for several months at Tuckey Hardware:



My desire for all things Roth was then further stoked by these ads:





Even though I saw such a Testor's paint display stand at the hobby shop above Cowan's Hardware in downtown London, I knew these paints were for more sophisticated cooler kids who could actually paint. And who could of course afford relatively more expensive spray paint cans!

I also remember gazing with wonder at this ad which also appeared on the back cover of some DC comics as well as on the back cover of issue #4 of Big Daddy Roth magazine:



Wow! Winning "Big Daddy" Roth's company as a house guest for a week! How cool would that be? A girl in her early teens from New Jersey actually won the contest with her "Scuz-Fink" submission.

What's certain is that this ad which appeared in issue #16 of Drag Cartoons that I bought in May 1965 sealed the deal in turning me into a "Big Daddy" Roth fanatic for life:







That issue proved key in shaping my interests since it also prompted me to send away to Millar Publications for every back issue of Drag Cartoons and Big Daddy Roth magazine I could get and also sparked an abiding interest in hot rods that's stayed with me to the present day.

I then bought a Revell Brother Rat Fink T-Shirt Iron-On Transfer at the Seven Mile Hobby Shop just west of the Southfield Expressway in Detroit in the early summer of 1965 and successfully applied it to one of my T-shirts:



My very old-school father though took one look at it, confiscated it and used it for a rag in the garage. Very sad. The same fate befell the Rat Fink sweatshirt I ordered up and received from "Big Daddy" Roth's shop in the winter of 1965-66.

I had also noticed an absolutely wild Angel Fink kit in the window of Steve's Variety & Gift Shop in Wortley Road Village just over a block from my house sometime after building the Rat Fink but I didn't buy it at the time:



I did so in the fall of 1965 though at a hobby shop in Wells, Maine when I was attending a boarding school in Kennebunkport, Maine. It became the first non-Aurora model kit I painted and I actually did a pretty good job.

I also clearly remember being tempted by the Surfink model kit when I saw it at Coles Books later in 1966 but passed on buying it because I was in high school by then....



Whenever that first exposure of mine to "Big Daddy" Roth's designs was, I was absolutely captivated just about from the get-go. This stuff I knew was absolutely outta sight wild cool (and something my parents just couldn't understand of course)!

TO BE CONTINUED

 

Ever notice how old show cars always seem to end up painted lime green metal flake?!

 

Wow! Complete with all the paints!

How/where/when did you manage to score that display?

 

I have seen numerous pictures of your home/museum. If it's not too intrusive, may I ask... What is your most valuable, cherished, piece in your entire collection and what makes it so?

 

I don't understand why the picture of the "Name him & win me!" ad isn't appearing in my post above. There's nothing wrong with the link and the picture appears when I try to Edit my post but it disappears when I actually post.

Is there some sort of limit on how many pictures a post can contain?

 

Okay! Tell me if you can see all the pictures in this post below.

 

...CONTINUED

By 1983 as an adult (well sort of) I was buying up whatever MIB Revell Roth kits I could find. At the time they were surprisingly cheap in comparison to the Aurora monster model kits. I now have almost all the ones I really want including the two slot cars with the exception of original issues of Scuz-Fink and Surfite:



















I also have the Rat Fink Iron-On Transfer:





I really want the other ones too including Brother Rat Fink but I'm still trying to track them down. I also have a very small decal collection including these sealed IMPKO ones:







I'd like to get more of the sealed IMPKO decals particularly the large 5 1/2" x 7" ones with the DR-1xx numbering

And to what I'm sure would have been the absolute disgust of my father, I have around 25 "Big Daddy" Roth T-shirts all purchased from Ed Roth himself or from a properly licenced re-seller:









While I've never gotten to meet "Big Daddy" Roth in person (he never did seem to appear at Toronto car shows), I've had a couple lengthy phone conversations with him around the turn of the century when I was ordering a bunch of his T-shirts. I simply dialed his number and he picked up the phone.

And to this very day I remain a wild-eyed drooling fan of "Big Daddy" Roth and his custom rods and finks! Don't you just love those happy endings?

 

Very good! I see them all as well.