If he couldn't wangle a big, flashy new engine or custom wheels and tires, he'd use what he could get or what was lying around.
But Ed was also strangely cheap and resourceful. Ed loved chrome, multicarburetors, and wild pipes, and apparently so did the showgoers.
His first conclusion was probably at least half right-that he should never have covered the engine with a hood. The theory was flawed, but that was a moot point since it couldn't very well be demonstrated at indoor car shows, anyway. His theory was that when the headlights were turned on at once, they would produce one strong, white light beam.
Ed had been an electronics nut since childhood and knew that the latest electronic sensation-color TV-was based on combinations of these three primary colors. These lights were tinted red, blue, and green. At the front of the car, two regular, round, clear headlights were set into coves on either side of the midmounted engine, shark-fin fiberglass fenders half-covered the front wheels, and a strange half-round, half-rectangular nose held one regular headlight in the rectangular side and three in the much larger, round, barrel-shaped side.
ED ROTH ORBITRON WORTH DRIVER
Its signature characteristics were a half-round clear bubbletop over a white fur-lined, tub-like driver's compartment placed at the extreme rear of the vehicle, with the driver sitting behind the rear wheels, slingshot dragster-style (the rear tires were narrow-band whitewall slicks on deep-dish chrome Astro wheels to augment the image). After the highly successful bright-yellow Mysterion and hot-pink Road Agent (another good-selling Revell model), Ed crafted the dark-blue, somewhat boxy Orbitron in 1964, possibly in as little as one or two months' build time. But it was so well-known and amazing (it, too, was a Revell model), that a complete, totally accurate replica of this vehicle showed up at Cobo Hall and was immediately snapped up by Ralph Whitworth, who is building a huge new automotive museum in Winnemucca, Nevada, which will include special Ed Roth and Von Dutch wings (stay tuned for more on this soon).īut the one Ed Roth fiberglass, bubbletop, asymmetrical show car that never seemed to be all that conspicuous either by its presence or by its absence is the one he called the Orbitron. They gave the remains to someone in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who gave them to a kid who may have tried to restore the Mysterion in his parents' basement but then had to get rid of it. In a lengthy, humorous account told in my book, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, His Life, Times, Cars and Art, custom builders Jack Walker and Doug Thompson were able to acquire the unwanted 'glass body from a custom shop in the Midwest in the '70s and seriously contemplated dumping the asymmetrical nose in the freeway median, lighting it on fire, and telling the cops it was part of a spaceship that fell out of the sky. We knew that the twin-engine, chrome-frame, bubbletop, Cyclops-nosed, and aptly named Mysterion had self-destructed from the weight of its two big-block Ford engines while being trucked from show to show, and little more than the front axle, wheels, and tires had been returned to Roth. We knew where Tweedy Pie was, but another well-known Roth machine-unquestionably his wildest of all-had been conspicuous by its absence for decades.
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