Ed "Big Daddy" Roth Tribute Thread!

[Hepcat]

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 seem 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", "Mr. Gasser", "Mother's Worry" and "Genuine Junk Parts" were rendered by Wes Bennett:

Hot Rod (March 1964)



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. 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 featured in the ad though had been drawn previously by Wes Bennett:

Drag Cartoons 8 (October 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 two ads from 1964 immediately above. Here are closer looks at some of Bennett's T-shirt designs with women:

[Hepcat]

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 seem quite crude by later standards:

Car Model (April 1963)

The silk-screening technology was quickly embraced by both customers and T-shirt producers at the time. Producers liked it because any design could be silk-screened onto a T-shirt in less than a minute by any employee while it would have taken "Big Daddy" Roth himself several minutes to air brush a design on a T-shirt. Meanwhile silk-screening was also popular with customers because the wild cool image you saw in the ad was the exact one you got. What's ironic though is an original "Big Daddy" Roth air brushed T-shirt could now fetch $hundreds depending upon condition. A mint never worn/washed one of a popular design from the early 1960's would fetch well over a $1000.

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 a decal of this early design:



The 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 our own Weldonmc:



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:

[Hepcat]

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. 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)



But Newt quickly leaned on 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.

This was the new T-shirt ad that Ed Newton designed for Drag Cartoons 9:



It can be seen that the "Mother's Slave" design is completely different in the second ad and that there are slight differences to "Drag Lover" and "Lover Boy" as well indicating they'd been redrawn by Newt. 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, Newton 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:

...the Bennett "print problem" was not Bennett's fault... It's just that his (art) style of cross-hatching and fine line proliferation created difficulties only when (Ed) Fuller would mix the screen-ink improperly. My style of "tapered linear rendering" for shading areas like tires, smoke & chrome reflections allowed for a thick or thin "ink mix" without the white void-areas "closing in", so in essence, my art was "Fuller-proof"!

[Hepcat]

Rat Fink Rings made their appearance in candy and convenience stores in 1965. They consisted of a ring that was a base for a detachable Rat Fink figure:



Here's a great website with lots more info on these rad cool rings:

RatFinkRing.Net

The Rat Fink figures came in at least twenty(!) different colours with at least eight different eye colours making for a minimum of 160 different combinations! Any collector worthy of the term will of course not be satisfied until he has every possible combination.

These rings were evidently also later packaged in pairs which included a whiskered variant:

Some of the Rat Fink charms that were sold in vending machines such as the ones on the card below were cheap knock-offs of these rings.



I keep wondering though whether the rings or any of the Rat Fink figures sold as charms in vending machines were properly licenced by Ed "Big Daddy" Roth and what if anything he received from their production and sale.

This other Rat Fink gumball machine card suggests that vending machine Rat Finks pre-dated the ones on rings since the U.S. Postal Service introduced Zip Codes in 1963 and Cramer Gum was still listing its location as Boston 28 on this vending machine card:



Cramer Gum was a brand name of Gum Products, Inc. which was founded in 1940 by Wellington M. Cramer, Jr. in Boston, Massachusetts. But World Wide Gum of Granby, Québec was initially the Canadian subsidiary of the Goudey Gum Company which was a competitor of Gum Products, Inc. Goudey had ceased operations in the States in 1962 which was before Cramer's Rat Fink Gum hit vending machines. I'm surmising therefore that World Wide Gum was by then an independent Canadian confectionery.

Note also the pointy ears of the ring and vending machine Rat Finks which differ from the rounded ears sported by the iconic Rat Fink which was introduced in the July 1963 issue of Car Craft magazine.

Tim Nolan indicates that the vending machine Rat Finks were first produced in 1962 in this reference guide to gumball machine Rat Fink charms:

The Gumball Rat Fink Museum - Ratdaddy Studios

The above is the very best reference guide I've ever seen on the wide mishmash of gumball machine Rat Fink charms that were issued.

[Hepcat]

The artist who did the box art for Revell's "Big Daddy" Roth model kits was the legendary Jack Leynnwood:



Box Art Illustrator Jack Leynnwood

Leynnwood did the art for five "Big Daddy" Roth's show car kits in 1962-63 before tackling any finks. His effort on the Mysterion is the wildest if not the best:



Here's the order in which Revell then released the fink kits:

1963

H-1301-100 Mr. Gasser
H-1302:100 Mother's Worry
H-1303:100 Drag Nut
H-1305:70 Rat Fink

1964

H:1304:100 Brother Rat Fink
H-1306:100 Surfink
H 1307:100 Angel Fink
H-1308:100 Superfink

1965

H-1309:100 Scuz-Fink
H-1310:100 Fink Eliminator
H-1270:200 Outlaw with "Robbin Hood Fink"
H-1271:200 Tweedy Pie with Boss-Fink

Mr. Gasser was therefore the first of the Roth finks to which Leynnwood applied himself. But finished Mr. Gasser line art for T-shirt screen printing purposes had evidently already been done by Carl Kohler:



Though Kohler's Mr. Gasser image was relatively crude, Leynnwood basically reproduced it for the Revell model kit:



By the end of 1964 Ed Newton had produced a much better Mr. Gasser drawing for T-shirts here beautifully coloured by our own Weldonmc:



Mother's Worry was Leynnwood's second fink kit. Now a line drawing of Mother's Worry by (probably) Carl Kohler was already being advertised in Roth T-shirt ads in early 1963. Here's the ad from the April 1963 issue of Car Model magazine:





Leynnwood though took a different approach to Mother's Worry and completely redrew the character:



By the late summer of 1964 the earlier T-shirt version of Mother's Worry had been refined by Ed Newton. Here it is coloured by Weldonmc:



I've not found any evidence of the existence of line art for Drag Nut before Leynnwood executed the Revell box art:



It appears though that Leynnwood redrew the Ford Man T-shirt art for Drag Nut:



Here's Ed Newton's subsequent late 1964 take on Drag Nut for T-shirt printing purposes coloured by Weldonmc:

[Hepcat]

Here's a fabulous Surfink by our own Tim Nolan:

[Hepcat]

While "Big Daddy" Roth epitomized California hot rod and surf culture in the 1960's, his appeal transcended oceans and hemispheres. Here's an ad for Roth T-shirts that ran in Australia:

[Hepcat]

In the summer of 1964(?) I 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 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.

Here's a picture I lifted off the net of two more of these Revell Ed "Big Daddy" Roth Iron-On Transfers:

[Hepcat]

Revell's staff artist Jack Leynnwood 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:

With the Rat Fink kit having been a resounding sales success, Revell decided to leverage the Rat Fink name by issuing a Brother Rat Fink kit early in 1964:



Jack Leynnwood once again did the box art. He almost certainly got his inspiration from these early Roth T-shirt designs by Wes Bennett:



Wes Bennett had at some point in late 1963 or early 1964 tweaked the Mother's Slave design to instead feature a Rat Fink-type character on a motorbike.

By 1965 Ed Newton had reworked the Brother Rat Fink design into a tougher one for T-shirts:

[Hepcat]

Revell released the Surfink! kit shortly after Brother Rat Fink in 1964:



Jack Leynnwood looks to have simply copied Surfink from the line art for Surf Nut that Wes Bennett rendered in 1963 with colouring here by noted Roth disciple Johnny Ace:



Here's the Surfink T-shirt design by (probably) Wes Bennett with colouring by our own maestro Weldonmc:

[Hepcat]

Revell released the Rat Fink in Lotus Racer and Mr. Gasser in BRM Racer slot car kits in 1965. Here are shots of the ones from my collection:







Revell launched the two kits with this ad in magazines such as Car Model and Boy's Life:



This original piece of artwork was however found among Dave Deal's (Deal's Wheels, etc.) possessions after he passed away in October 2008:



Unfortunately I've not yet been able to determine whether the above illustration was ever used for a magazine ad or as part of store displays.

[MonsterBaker666]

Is it just me, or does Surf Nut look like a certain former President?

[Monster Mafia]

Yeah,and it looks like Stormy is next to him! 

[Hepcat]

Hmmmm, yeah! We need more of that in public life! I don't like my politicians to be Mr. Clean when it comes to hickory, dickory, dork. Party hearty with interns and say "Yes!" to porn stars, but say "No!" to demands on the public purse.

[Hepcat]

Angel Fink was the next Roth kit Revell released in 1964 with box art again by Jack Leynnwood:



The inspiration for the kit was this Roth design where Wes Bennett may have rendered the line art:



Our own Weldonmc did the colouring of the above image.