Iowahawk wrote a tremendous, lengthy story about the history of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth's fantastic Orbitron show car, which had been, until discovered parked in front of a Mexican sex shop in 2007, "one of the two lost grails of Rothdom." More than being just about the Orbitron, though, Iowahawk's story is an engrossing personal account (he met Roth as a child and their lives were sort of intertwined) of revisiting and reflecting on Roth's creations, both cultural and vehicular. Even if you don't like hot rods I recommend reading it.
In his July 1963 interview with Rod & Custom, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth teased readers with news about a new project he had started, one he called the Bald Eagle. "I am going to build a car that will be irresistible to women," said Roth. "They will want to climb on it, scratch the paint and just crawl all over it."
That chick-magnet project was later renamed the Orbitron. In '63 BDR was under pressure from Revell to produce another wild show car, one that would become, like the Outlaw and Beatnik Bandit and Mysterion before it, a show circuit sensation and million-selling plastic model kit. BDR pull all the stops for the effort: Working from an idea by Roth, Ed Newton drew a concept and Roth and Dirty Doug began shaping its fiberglass form in the Maywood shop. It was long and low, asymmetric, built like a UFO dragster with the driver sitting behind the axle. Like the Beatnik Bandit and Mysterion it featured a bubbletop blown at Acry Plastics, but with a spacious angel fur interior big enough to accommodate Roth and one of those girls he talked about in R&C. The previous year Ford had given Roth three new 406 crate motors, two of which went into the Mysterion; the third went into his '55 Chevy daily. Roth chromed out the '55's original 265 small block and stuffed it in the Orbitron's engine compartment. Its centerpiece was a long tubular nosecone, jutting forward of the front wheels, containing a pod of Red-Green-Blue lights that, BDR explained, would combine into a single white beam. After getting a luscious Larry Watson blue fade paintjob, it was ready for its debut in early '64.
By all rights the car should have been another triumph. At the time Big Daddy was King and his Rat Fink Empire was at its peak; Roth Studios was pumping out millions of grotesque t-shirts and doodads for rebellious kids around the globe, model kit royalties were pouring in, and the Maywood shop was the undisputed center of the kustom car universe. He had just been lionized by Tom Wolfe in the bestseller Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, which compared him to Salvador Dali and called his cars things like "baroque" and "Dionysian."
Instead, the Orbitron was a flop. On the '64-'65 show circuit, it was greeted with public indifference. Contemporary photographs show the Orbitron in the parking lot of Revell awaiting measurement for a model kit that was never released. Roth theorized the Orbitron was too similar to the Mysterion, and that he screwed up in hiding the chromed engine behind its body panels. He also blamed the Beatles, whose 1964 appearance on Ed Sullivan coincided with the Orbitron's debut and ushered in a new wave of youth culture more attuned to electric guitars than fantasy show cars.
Orbitron Apocalypto (Thanks, Coop!)
