In the last two decades, as art museums and other institutions have begun taking a closer look at pop culture, Roth and his peers gained more respect from the academics who had long dismissed their works as lowbrow. His fans admired the energy and anti-establishment attitude he carried throughout his life. “I know what I am,” Roth told The Times in 1973. The company canceled his contract in 1967. Revell, however, lost its love for Roth when he began hanging out with members of the Hells Angels as his interest in customizing motorcycles grew. Roth, who was 6 feet 4, mentioned that he had been called “Big Ed” in high school, so the publicist suggested “Big Daddy,” which Roth loved. It was a Revell publicity man who came up with Roth’s nickname after telling him, “We can’t put ‘Beatnik Bandit by Ed Roth’ on the box.” The Revell company sold millions of Big Daddy Roth model car kits, from which Roth received a royalty of 1 cent each. The character’s wise-guy, street smart attitude lives on in such descendants as Bart Simpson, Ren & Stimpy and the foulmouthed “South Park” kids. Rat Fink’s sinister glare, razor-sharp teeth and bulging, bloodshot eyes became ubiquitous on T-shirts, posters and car decals in the ‘60s. Roth developed Rat Fink in the ‘50s as the underground culture’s response to Mickey Mouse. “His stuff was all outrageous,” said Dick Messer at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, where the Outlaw car now resides. Nora Donnelly, who organized the “Customized” exhibition for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where it premiered last fall, said: “An enormous amount of people have been influenced by him, in the hot rod art world as well as in the contemporary art world.” “You can clearly see that influence on the arts, and it certainly had a bigger influence here in the West than it did in the East, where New York largely dominated the art world.” “Our specific purpose,” said Howard Fox, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, “was to reveal the influence of the automobile generally, and the concepts of speed, the aesthetics of sleekness and the interest that painters and sculptors of the 1960s had in new materials we often associate with these fast-paced racing cars, and with “Big Daddy” Roth in particular.
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