![]() ![]() “He knew how much his art was worth to me.” “I can still picture Ed eating a bag of burgers while I’m going through his personal archive of artwork,” Hafen remembers. Most of the artwork he remembered from his childhood had been redone after Roth converted to Mormonism, but he did walk away with the refrigerator door the original Rat Fink was painted on, as well as Mud Truckin’, which Roth signed. “I had very specific things I was looking for,” he said. When Hafen traveled to Manti to choose some of Roth’s art, he went with a shopping list. Hafen traded a sapphire, gold and diamond ring for some of Roth’s artwork. Hafen couldn’t quite understand the concept, so Roth sculpted his idea out of clay and drove it to Hafen’s shop. Then Roth met Ilene, and sent Hafen more sketches. “He could be no one else and that proved too much for her.” “He was still Big Daddy Roth,” Hafen explained. Roth sent him sketches, but the engagement didn’t work out. When that marriage ended in divorce, Roth began frequenting singles dances and met a woman he wanted to marry. He married his third wife and moved to Manti, Utah. Midlife, Roth began re-examining his situation and subsequently joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Rat Fink t-shirts were extremely popular then, and still sell well through hotrod websites. Roth’s most widely recognized cartoon character, Rat Fink, was the monster-like antithesis of Mickey Mouse. He received 1-cent from each kit sold and in 1963 earned $32,000 in royalties. The Revell toy company produced model car kits from Roth’s designs. With the advent of fiberglass construction, Roth began designing and fabricating fantastic one-of-a-kind hotrods. He studied engineering in college, but building cars is what interested him most. Roth grew up in California and had an affinity for both fast cars and drawing grotesque cartoon caricatures. He gave me his card and called me about a month later.” When they met, Hafen gave Roth his card and told him, “I build lots of custom design stuff. The image and name of the design, Wasted on Wine, didn’t fly with Hafen’s mom. He remembers the shirt he wanted but wasn’t allowed to purchase, a Beatnik beret-wearing ratrod with a goatee holding a bottle of wine. For sale on the back pages were t-shirts with Roth’s idiosyncratic cartoon designs. Like Roth, Hafen’s specialty is custom design. Hafen owns Charley Hafen Custom Jewelers and has known of the Big Daddy and his artwork since he was a boy. “I thought, ‘Whoa! That’s Ed Roth!’ when I saw him,” recalls the Salt Lake City jeweler. Feel free to poke around the site and view the many forms of Rat Fink art.Charley Hafen met the celebrated artist Ed “Big Daddy” Roth in 1996 when Roth was hawking his signed silkscreened drawings at a car show. 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. 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. ![]()
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