![]() ![]() "Rat Fink was probably the most famous of his monsters that he created," said David Chodosh, 40, a friend and business associate. ![]() ![]() Roth created Rat Fink and a host of other wild monster characters to help pay the bills and finance his car-design work. "He's the Salvador Dali of the movement - a surrealist in his designs, a showman by temperament, a prankster," Wolfe wrote. He was described by author Tom Wolfe in his 1964 essay on the California hot-rod phenomenon, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," as the "most colorful, the most intellectual and the most capricious" of the car customizers. While Roth worked on custom cars in his Lakewood garage-studio, youths across the country broke out the airplane glue to work on intricate scale plastic models of his "Outlaw" roadster, bubble-topped "Beatnik Bandit," or futuristic "Mysterion."Īs a designer, Roth was considered a genius and visionary, not only for his radical designs, but also for his pioneering use of fiberglass in car bodies. Male teenagers also adopted his airbrushed anti-hero, the bug-eyed, menacing Rat Fink, who became a cultural counterpoint to Mickey Mouse. The cause of death was not immediately given.Ī generation of teenage rebels across the country found a hero in Roth, whose chrome and fiberglass creations stirred awe at car shows. Roth died Wednesday at his studio in Manti, Utah, said Joe Bennett, a dispatcher with the Sanpete County Sheriff's Department. LOS ANGELES - Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, the outlaw genius whose fantastic car creations and anti-hero Rat Fink character helped define the California hot-rod culture of the 1950s and '60s, has died. ![]()
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