Ed "Big Daddy" Roth collection online

The Boss Fink is a tough kit to find!

Is that "Big Daddy" Roth's original Tweedy Pie though? If so, how did it find its way into your hands?

 

Clone or not, your Outlaw is one fabulous ride! Is that a 331-c.i. Cadillac mill with Stromberg two-barrel carbs up front?

 

I take it that the vehicles are model kits you've assembled. But where did you get the human figures including "Big Daddy" Roth?

 

I don't see Ken.

 

Damn!!

 

The iconic Rat Fink image made its first appearance in the July 1963 issue of Car Craft magazine in an ad entitled "The rage in California". Here's the decal of this early design:



This original Rat Fink image may well have been drawn by Carl Kohler before he was supplanted by Wes Bennett as Roth's go-to artist some time in 1963. Here it is with coloured pencils applied by my friend Weldonmc R.I.P.:



Jack Leynnwood who did much of the box art for Revell then cleaned up the art just a bit by trimming the hair in and around Rat Fink's ears and rounding the "R" for the Revell model kit which was issued just a few months later in 1963:



Jack Leynnwood's very slightly reworked Rat Fink subsequently became "Big Daddy" Roth's signature piece. The Rat Fink design thereafter sold by Roth Studios as decals and on T-shirts was Leynnwood's reworked version with slightly simplified R.F. lettering:

 

Awwww man, once again I can see the pictures in my post above when I go into Edit but I see only little red X's after I post. Can everyone else see the four pictures above?



P.S. Interesting! I see my pictures when I switch browsers from Google Chrome to Firefox.

 

^Nice set! I want 'em!

 

Customers responding to "Big Daddy" Roth's T-shirt ads before 1963 got a T-shirt individually air brushed by "Big Daddy" Roth himself:



By early 1963 the T-shirts "Big Daddy" Roth was offering through magazine ads featured standardized images applied to the T-shirts by a silk-screening process. Many/most of the designs pictured in the ad below were line art renderings by Carl Kohler who together with Pete Millar had founded CARtoons magazine in 1959. These early finished renderings for silk-screening purposes are quite crude by later standards:

Car Model (April 1963)



By late 1963 artist Wes Bennett who did work for Petersen Publications (e.g. CARtoons, Hot Rod, Car Craft) was turning "Big Daddy" Roth's designs into far more sophisticated line art renderings. All the T-shirt designs in the following two ads with the exception of "Rat Fink", "Mother's Worry", "Pray for Surf" and "Genuine Junk Parts" were rendered by Wes Bennett:

Hot Rod (March 1964)



Wes Bennett was therefore the artist who drew almost all the "Big Daddy" Roth designs in the 1963-64 period featuring women including the ones in the ad from 1964 immediately above. Here are closer looks at some of Bennett's T-shirt designs:









Colouring of the above designs by Weldonmc R.I.P.





Colouring of the above design by Johnny Ace (I think).















Ed Newton was then hired by Roth in 1964 both to design show cars and to create magazine ads for Roth's T-shirt line. Here in Newt's own words:

The first ad designed by Newt was for the August 1964 issue #6 of Drag Cartoons. The same ad was featured again in the next two issues. Almost all of the designs displayed in the ad though had been drawn previously by Wes Bennett:

Drag Cartoons 8 (October 1964)






Note that the hot rodder pictured at the top of Newt's first ad bore a striking and probably not entirely coincidental resemblance to Newt himself!

TO BE CONTINUED....

 

...CONTINUED

But Ed Newton quickly leaned on "Big Daddy" Roth to be allowed to turn Roth's airbrushed concepts into finished line art for T-shirts. The ads designed by Newt soon began to showcase his own T-shirt renderings. Here is the T-shirt ad that Newt designed for the October-November issue #1 of Big Daddy Roth magazine which ran again in #2:





Killer Plymouth was the first Roth T-shirt design which Newt pencilled:



I'm guessing Killer Corvair came shortly thereafter:



Colouring of the above two designs courtesy of Weldonmc.

And here is the T-shirt ad that Newt designed for the November 1964 issue of Drag Cartoons 9 which ran again in Drag Cartoons 10:



It can be seen that the "Mother's Slave" design is completely different in the above ad from the ad in the previous three issues of Drag Cartoons and that there are slight differences to "Drag Lover" and "Lover Boy" as well indicating they'd been redrawn by Newt. Here are Newt's redraws of the respective designs:







Colouring of the above "Lover Boy" design courtesy of Weldonmc.

Now I know that Drag Cartoons 6 hit newsstands around 14 July 1964 since my copy has a date stamp. Similarly I know that Drag Cartoons 9 hit newsstands around 8 October 1964. Given the few weeks lead time Millar Publications would have needed for ad submissions to make print deadlines, Newt must clearly have already been doing T-shirt designs by September 1964 anyway.

Incidentally the reason Newt was redrawing some of Wes Bennett's still very popular earlier designs was that they wouldn't necessarily print "clean" until Newt redrew them in his own ink friendly style. In Newt's own words:

Here are more of Newt's ads which by this time featured mostly his own T-shirt design renderings:

Drag Cartoons 11 (January 1965)



Note how Newt continued to insert pictures of himself in the ads!

Drag Cartoons 12 (February 1965)



Big Daddy Roth 3 (February-March 1965)





TO BE CONTINUED....

 

...CONTINUED

So continuing on with Newt's early ads:

Drag Cartoons 13 (March 1965)





Big Daddy Roth 4 (April-May 1965)





Drag Cartoons 14 (April 1965)





Drag Cartoons 15 (May 1965)





Here's a collage put together by Alan "Eye Bone" Eglington of "Big Daddy" Roth designs finished in pencil and ink by Ed Newton:



Newt's cover art also graced this "Big Daddy" Roth T-shirt catalog from 1965:



The T-shirts and sweat shirts customers got at the time of these ads came spray painted with fluorescent colour streaks as pictured in this Ed Newton ad where all the designs are drawn by Newt with the exception of "Rat Fink" and Wes Bennett's "Mad Dragger", "Drag Lover" and "Big Bad Dodge":



TO BE CONTINUED....

 

...CONTINUED

While in the 1963 to 1965 period the focus was largely on the monster finks in their cars, by 1966 the Roth designs Newt was executing were featuring mostly the cars themselves:

























Once again, the full colouring of many of the above designs was the work of Weldonmc R.I.P.

Here's an ad from 1969 that illustrates the extent to which "Big Daddy" Roth's T-shirt offerings had evolved away from monster finks by the late 1960's:



This was perhaps due to custom hot rod culture having been supplanted by the instant muscle offered by dedicated factory street rods, i.e. muscle cars, that arose in the latter part of the 1960's. Since muscle car enthusiasts were keen on celebrating their loyalties to certain models, the focus of "Big Daddy" Roth's T-shirt designs shifted to cater to this new market preference.

Nonetheless the popularity of Roth T-shirts still faded in the late 1960's. This was partially due to cultural factors but Ed Roth himself made some questionable life choices which compromised his relationship with Revell and therefore undermined his popularity with kids who might have been introduced to Roth designs through Revell model kits. Therefore I'm not entirely sure whether Ed Newton continued with Roth Studios right through to the end of the 1960's.

In any event Roach Studios hired Ed Newton in 1971 to work with their commercial artists as the Creative Director for their custom car and other t-shirt designs. That's why so many of the Roach T-shirt designs advertised in hot rod magazines thereafter such as the two below looked very much like those previously offered in "Big Daddy" Roth T-shirt ads:





Roach T-shirt ads were omnipresent in car mags through the 1970's and the company dominated the wild custom T-shirt market in this period. I bought these two myself:





Finally here's a picture of Ed Newton in 2004:

 

Once again, are all my pictures coming up for everyone else? All I'm getting right now is a little red X for the eight pictures below the "Do unto others with a Ford" design.

 

Great history lesson Balticfox. Thanx

 

Firefox is a go for me. Thanks is in order, great stuff!