Tales of the rat fink
With his high-energy smile pictured on the boxes, Roth became a kind of celebrity for young boys. His creations lucratively found a market in model car replica kits. His crazy cars, like the prize-winning Outlaw with its horrid, blue and white loveseat and gleaming engine exposed to the open air, could only be driven by the Banana Splits. The fifties and early sixties become cartoon times, not something to feel, although maybe it was all just a cartoon time in Roth's own eyes.Īnd by the time Roth got into fibreglass, his car designs looked straight out of Hanna-Barbera world. The digital effects, even if necessary to bring the still photos to life, only end up widening the gap between then and now. Mann uses simple animation of Rat Fink throughout, much in the same way he digitally adds touches of movement to old photos of Roth. Then there was Roth's early cartoon creation Rat Fink, the bulgy eyed, anti-Mickey Mouse. The film even credits Roth with being the first to create T-shirts with messages. Today, everyone has seen a T-shirt like this and the graphics have come to epitomize a certain frame of mind for young boys.
By the late fifties and early sixties, Roth was creating cartoon monster T-shirts, with slobbering grotesqueries barely contained inside the driver's seat of jalopies. Roth's caricature graphics became a trademark.Īnd as most things do, this seeped into kids' culture. He was also there as hot rodders, running out of space on their cars, felt the need to accessorize their stark, white T-shirts. Graduating from homemade hot-rodding to custom car painting, it was Roth who helped to introduce flaming paint jobs. Roth is remembered less for the driving than for the detailing. Set the scene with Bob's Big Boy drive-ins, show the historic drag strips, talk about chassis design and the grassroots personalities, play some twangy So-Cal surf music and immediately you feel its roots. Tales of the Rat Fink hoping for a similar immersion, emotion-stained from mechanics, but with little need for on-screen explanation. Undoubtedly, many will go to director Ron Mann's documentary But the culture is understood and runs deep. Less is always more in the language of mechanics. He described it in the same tone we always used, never too personal. Rebel Without a Cause burning around Vancouver's Point Grey. Drunk in general (at least that's how I picture it). In contrast to the quiet of the ride, our chains and hubs whirring beneath us, he talked about how he and his friends used to scream along that road hot-rod style when he was young. Winding along a shoreline route in Vancouver, talking in our usual bike lingo and understood references, he got to mentioning the fifties. Tales of the Rat Fink, about hot-rod designer and artist Ed (Big Daddy) Roth, triggered something incredible a late-middle-aged cyclist once told me.
#TALES OF THE RAT FINK FREE#
Feel free to poke around the site and view the many forms of Rat Fink art.Voice-overs by John Goodman, Ann-Margret, Jay Leno, Brian Wilson and Tom Wolfe
Rat Fink Art comes in all shapes and sizes, from YO-YO’s to Halloween masks, posters to shirts. Roth should either have been canonized or smothered at birth. Depending on your age, sex and mechanical inclinations, “Tales of the Rat Fink” will convince you that Mr. “Cars should have personality,” he tells us, in a tone that suggests he’s struggling to locate his own. Roth in “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”) and Ann-Margret, while a strangely listless John Goodman serves as the voice of Mr. Roth, who died in 2001, might have found a tad cutesy - is an appropriately eclectic bunch of celebrities, including Tom Wolfe (who celebrated Mr.
Lending their voices to the cars themselves - a trick Mr. More instructive about the obsessions of teenage boys than the allure of steel and wheel, “Tales of the Rat Fink” punctuates Michael Roberts’s Rat Fink Art with eyeball-searing animation, a haphazard selection of old newsreels, photographs and automobile ads. I’ll bet Donald Trump wishes he had thought of that one. Roth’s lucrative idea to paint hideous monsters - including the Rat Fink Art - on children’s T-shirts, a sartorial trend that, in the 1960’s, had the added benefit of getting their wearers of Rat Fink Art banned from school, thus giving them more time to play with Mr.
#TALES OF THE RAT FINK MOVIE#
Ogling fins and drooling over fenders, the movie traces the colorful history of the hot rod from speed machine to babe magnet and, finally, museum piece and collector’s item.