See the fiendish, crazed driver of the hot rod depicted on the shirt? I can recall as a child in the early 70s seeing stickers or perhaps some other ephemera where this kind of image was depicted. What I’m NOT able to recall, however, is any kind of cultural context associated with this. I mean was this part of a cartoon or comic book series? An album cover? A ‘meme’ like the ubiquitous ‘smiley face’ seen in the 70s? Perhaps a beloved counterculture character not unlike R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural? Help me recall some context…where and why did images like this appear?
The stuff that came with Topps, or Wacky Stickers, or the weird-o cards, wasn’t gum. It was pink fiberboard. I remember we used to keep stacks of it, because what else could you do with it?
Not only were there the cartoons, decals, stickers, bubble gum cards, and the like. Ed Roth licensed model kits of hos Weird-O characters. They sold these from the late 1960s on, and it looks as if they’ve been revived
In the 70s there was a very big car, hot rod, trucker thing that consumed pop culture, which included such movies as Smokey and the Bandit, and Convoy, and TV shows like Movin’ On, BJ and the Bear, and Dukes of Hazzard. Odd Rods and other CAR-Toons were all a part of that.
Yeah, but California Car Culture was an established thing long before that Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and similar guys were customizing their hot rods and making offbeat and innovative fiberglas and metal flake bodies in the 1950s and 1960s, and CAR-Toons was an established thing in the 1960s. I wasn’t into it, but I knew people who were. And I saw the mags in the newsstands. You couldn’t miss the pervasive image of Roth’s Rat Fink even if you tried.
As a young teen into cars I read CAR-toons with drawings from George Trosley. Imagine my surprise as an older teen coming across a Hustler magazine and seeing his art work in that publication also, not necessarily drawing cars!
