In 1962, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth began constructing a show car that would soon disappear into obscurity, and later come to be regarded as his magnum opus. That car was The Mysterion:
With its twin Ford 406 engines, large rear slicks and tiny front wheels, Roth was clearly influenced by the multi-engined dragsters of the day, but the asymmetrical cyclops headlight and plastic bubble top make it look like a space invader from the planet Weirdo.
The body work was sculpted by hand using newspaper and plaster to build up the basic shapes, then overlaid with fibreglass and the hardened plaster was chipped out from the inside. A messy and inelegant process, but effective. After its completion, the body was painted candy yellow by noted painter Larry Watson.
The interior is a cramped single-seat cockpit with a metalflake steering wheel and matching seat, and is lined with what might be Sasquatch fur, or something equally bizarre. Clearly, the Mysterion was not built to drive to work, but to blow minds and challenge conventional ideas about what a car could or should be.
The frame of the car was crafted from C-shaped members that were filled with lightening holes (another race-inspired detail) and fully chromed. The heavy weight of the dual engines and transmissions in that frame ultimately lead to the car’s demise.
As the story goes, the car repeatedly developed stress cracks in the frame while being transported by trailer between shows, and often required some sort of re-assembly at its destination. After just one year of shows, Roth grew so frustrated with the constant repairs, he finally pushed the car off the trailer into a ditch somewhere in Oklahoma. Whether that’s true or not, the car was never publicly seen again, and if anyone knows what finally became of the car’s original parts, they aren’t talking. The Mysterion just vanished, as though it had returned to its home planet.
Eventually, Ed Roth himself also disappeared from public life. For about three decades, the Mysterion lived on only in photos, and as a Revell model kit:
In 2001, Ed Roth passed away. Many of his most iconic creations had been saved over the years by collectors and counterculture art fans, but his wildest and (in my opinion) best looking car ever was lost to history.
Then in 2005 with very little warning, The Mysterion returned to Earth.
Well, maybe not The Mysterion, but perhaps an echo of itself across time, or an alternate-universe version of itself. The Mysterion had been carefully and meticulously cloned through the dedicated efforts of car nuts and Roth devotees Mark Moriarity and Dave Shuten.
It’s quite possible that Roth, if he were here to see it, might shake his head and wonder why these spent so much time and effort to recreate a car that was four decades past its heyday instead of creating something new. Roth was never one to look to the past or even linger in the present, and likely drastically underestimated his impact on pop culture. For those of us who knew the car and remembered the man, it was like seeing an old friend again. I nearly lost my mind when I saw the first photos to leak on the net from the ’05 Detroit Autorama.
Cars like this aren’t everyone’s cup of joe, and that’s cool. I’ll admit that it’s a bit of a stretch to even call The Mysterion a “car”: it barely moved under its own power, it was nearly impossible to drive with the bubble down, and it was certainly not streetable. Maybe Roth’s cars were more automotive sculpture than anything. A physical projection of an impossible fusion between mechanism and aesthetics. Never intended for real world use, they challenged convention, broke new creative ground, and influenced other more practical interpretations that came after them.
Those who get it get it and those who don’t don’t. There’s no right or wrong in that, it just is. Like Big Daddy said, if I gotta explain, you wouldn’t understand.
Great story!