I loved Ed Roth, especially as a child. If Roth had been a traveling circus, I would have left home to join. As it was, I got a chance to work with him in the 1980s and 1990s on some cars and art. I came up with this contemporary-for-the-times Mysterion II design cribbed from his original Mysterion of 1963. I swooped up his original, and thinking it might actually get built, I wanted it powered by something equally as mind-blowing as the twin-Ford FE power of the original, but less literal and more driveable, so I drew an LT5 Corvette engine.
I showed it to him at the 1990 SEMA Show, where we had dinner one night at the huge Circus Circus buffet—Ed loved those big, cheap, Vegas-y, all-you-can-eat buffets. He liked my drawings, but was not interested. I was hoping if he didn’t get geeked about it someone else might, so with his permission, it was mine to foist on whoever might build it. It ran in an issue of Rod & Custom and got some bites, but it’s one of many designs that collect dust in the backroads of my portfolio. However, it did spark something in Ed, and soon he was building a contemporary-for-the-times Beatnik Bandit. Since my Mysterion II was the inspiration for him doing a new Beat, he asked me to do the Rat Fink graphics on the side of it—something very graphic and not like any RF depiction, per Ed’s instructions.
Needless to say, that became the least-liked part of the Beatnik Bandit II from many comments I’ve read and heard over the years. Besides rejection, you have to let evil comments roll off your back if you intend to hang your designs out there for all to see.
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