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. 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. It was long and low, asymmetric, built like a UFO dragster with the driver sitting behind the axle. 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. 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. That chick-magnet project was later renamed the Orbitron. "They will want to climb on it, scratch the paint and just crawl all over it." "I am going to build a car that will be irresistible to women," said Roth. 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. Even if you don't like hot rods I recommend reading it.
There were several much more successful asymmetrical designs of the period that I thought looked great in spite of their oddness.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. Part of the reason is that, though it was built by Roth, it wasn't designed by Roth. What worked against the Orbitron most was the fact that it was just flat ugly, without enough wow cool to make it to the big time. Which is probably one reason we've never seen that kit re-issued, but its double-kit partner the 1927 Model T Touring Car has been re-popped several times. Tex Smith's XR-6 was another example of asymmetrical styling. Like in the Orbitron, that weird 3-lens robot eye or whatever it is. IIRC, the reasoning was that since the driver always sat on one side of the car, the styling should offset that. That meant putting a pronounced/exaggerated styling feature on the other side of the car.
I think another reason for its failure was that wonky "asymmetrical" styling.įor you youngsters, that was a (thankfully) short-lived styling fad in the early Sixties. The concealed engine didn't help, since those chrome-drenched Roth engines always looked so good.
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