The Kandy-Kolored Monster from the Id

Not long ago I wrote a lengthy post about 1950s science fiction and galactic empires. In 25 words or less, the galactic empires of pulp sci-fi were metaphors for the very real world empire that America built in the '50s.

The United Nations (United Planets), The Soviet Union ( Arcturan Empire), corporations (interstellar traders), nuclear weapons (nuclear weapons) -- they're all in there. And flying cars, blaster rifles (like lasers, only things blow up), clunky robots, immortality, and the Space Patrol.

It's a wacky through-the-looking-glass world, and if you ever want to check it out without actually reading '50s pulp sci-fi, rent the movie Forbidden Planet. Made in the early 50s on a big budget with special effects by Walt Disney, it holds up pretty well. And it includes every sci-fi gimmick of the time except maybe time travel.

Brief synopsis: a scientist on an expedition to a ruined world finds a giant machine of mysterious purpose, made by an extinct race called the Krell. The scientist, Dr. Morbius, studies it for years; never figures it out, though he discovers other Krell technological wonders.

What Morbius doesn't know is that the machine makes one's every wish come true; it reads your mind and creates whatever you want. You think it, it happens. But the machine works too well; it makes every fleeting impulse come true, including the ones we suppress in the name of civilization and not ripping each other's throats out at the shopping mall. Not hard to figure out how the Krell went extinct.

And one thing about academics like our scientist: they're always pissed off at somebody.

And every time Dr. Morbius becomes truly angry with someone, the machine gives form to his basest thoughts and a "monster from the id" bumps off the object of his ire in an unfortunate "accident."

Amazing how many accidents can happen on a dead planet. In the end there's no one left from the expedition but Morbius and his beauteous daughter.

Morbius is a typical sci-fi movie scientist: simultaneously arrogant and clueless. He has no idea what's happening; he doesn't consciously wish for anyone to die, and he doesn't know what the machine is capable of. But eventually the Space Patrol lands on the planet in search of the lost expedition, and his own daughter tells him she's going to leave the planet with a SP officer.

And the "monster from the id" comes for her, too. And the lightbulb turns on in Dr. Morbius' brain. Great scene.

Everybody has a monster from the id. When you get jerked around by your parents, or a co-worker, or some faceless bureaucrat in a government office building, or a supposed friend who lets you down, the monster appears. And then comes that white-hot flash of anger that, if amplified by an alien device, would burn the object of your ire to a pile of ash.

Fortunately, 21st century Earth does not enjoy the benefits of Krell thought-transmutation technology. But when the monster from the id howls, oh how we can wish for it. The monster wants to drive 100 miles an hour down the street; hanging out the window, screaming, and running over anybody who won't make way.

And that's where Ed Roth comes in. Ed "Big Daddy" Roth was an inventor, a mechanic, a cartoonist and decorative painter, a sculptor -- and a creator of bizarre custom cars. A wild-eyed LA gearhead from the '50s and '60s, Ed Roth celebrated LA car culture and middle-class nonconformity with a welding torch in one hand and an airbrush in the other.

Ed Roth was a grinning, goateed beatnik Satan in a t-shirt and a top hat: a self-confessed "weird-oh" (he may have invented the term) who celebrated how much fun it was to be weird and different and make cool things and tool around in cool cars. Ed Roth and pals of his like "The Baron" and "Von Dutch" and the Barris brothers dominated the car magazines and car shows for twenty years.

But Roth went farther than the others. He tapped into the bubbling, pent-up psyches of eight- to twelve-year-old American boys who dreamed of driving and being weird and telling their parents where to get off. Ed signed with Revell Models and had all his custom cars issued as plastic model kits so the kids could build weirdness for themselves. It was a perfect fit: his cars actually looked like the kind of insanely muscular fantasy cars twelve-year-olds used to draw in their school notebooks.




And then there were the monster car t-shirts...


Originally, Ed's business was custom auto paint jobs; he was one of the go-to guys in LA if you wanted cool pinstripes for your ride. He'd paint anything on a car. And if you saw Ed at a car show and gave him four bucks, he'd airbrush a crazy, drooling bug-eyed monster driving a cool car at great speed. Or some weird character covered with warts and your hot rod club's name across the top. Whatever you wanted. Right on the spot. LA rodders wore Ed's shirts proudly; they even appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated.



Then Ed discovered the joy of t-shirt silk-screening, and soon twelve-year-olds across the nation could buy shirts with his monster designs at a very reasonable price. I remember pages and pages of monster-car designs -- all for any teen or tween to buy -- in the back of model-car magazines and hot rod magazines.


Revell even issued Roth monster designs as plastic models: Astro-Nut, Mother's Worry, and of course -- Rat Fink, the ultimate unacceptable-to-the-folks weird-oh. Kids bought the kits by the truckload. Even my older sister bought an Astro-Nut kit. As I recall, she did a masterful job painting red veins on the eyeballs.


Ed's cars and monster designs grabbed American tween culture by the gearshift knob and hung on tight until the Beatles got big. He had the shirts, the kits, decals, his own magazine for a while, a fan club, issued record albums as "Mr. Gasser," and even put out coloring books. It was the early and mid-60s and America was prosperous and dull and kids weren't supposed to rock the boat. But every once in a while you could put on one of those shirts with the eyeballs and slime and vermin and giant engines and great big teeth and let your id out to SCREAM. Or build a crazy Ed Roth monster model. Or at least slap a Rat Fink decal on your Pee Chee.


Ed Roth passed on over ten years ago, but his car monsters still live on with the culture. To this very day, artists draw designs of cars driven by giant screaming creatures -- or cars that actually are screaming creatures. And many of Ed's designs and merchandise are still around and selling well. All at a reasonable price for people who want to let out their id monster, just a little. Including the usual angry and repressed teenagers.

I've got a number of Roth-like designs in my collection of odd t-shirts, created for businesses or product lines or organization that appeal to the inner id-monster. And who more than the U.S. Air Force?


Crazy amateur-designed unit t-shirts are common in the military, and not a few of them take their ideas Ed Roth. The military actually wants you to let your id monster out -- on orders. RED HORSE is a real acronym for a type of mobile Air Force construction battalion: "Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operations Repair Squadron Engineers." Who knows how much time the brass spent coming up with that name?

Aside from our apparently-too-much-time-on-their-hands mlitary officer corps, teens also still go for Roth-like design -- but on skateboard decks. This t-shirt from my collection has a classic graphic from a national skateboard company.


Behold the screaming sword skateboard. The monster from the id is alive and well in skateboard culture.We old people don't notice, because skateboard graphics are on the underside of the decks. You only see them when the kid does a jump or a turn. But the kids know they're there. And the skateboard manufacturers also sell t-shirts with their deck designs.

Even businessmen feels rebellious or defiant sometime, and invoke the Ed Roth asthetic to speak for them. What if you had a business called Rib King, and drove a truck selling barbecue ribs and pulled pork in a town full of vegetarians and animal-rights activists -- like Santa Cruz? You could be apologetic and sensitive to people's opinions; or you declare yourself as an unabashed vendor of roast swineflesh. Guess what the Rib King did?


I bought this t-shirt for retail price, off the Rib King himself. I never pay retail, I only buy used. But a giant monster burning pig driving a barbecue wagon through the night at warp speed? I had to have it.

There's no question that the monsters from our ids can go too far -- just look at the state of the world today. But that's because people handle their ids like Dr. Morbius did, and not like Ed Roth's fans.

Old Morbius couldn't see that he even had an id monster. So it ran around loose without his control, killing people while he barely knew what was going on.

Film critics say that "Forbidden Planet" warns that there are some powers that are beyond the control of man, power that we should never aspire to. I call bullshit on that. But "Forbidden Planet" does tell me that you don't take the power unless you know your own dark side and have stared your id monster in the face.

Karl Jung knew. The master of the collective unconscious said that if you try to ignore your dark side, it will control you -- despite all your best intentions. It'll eat you. Dr. Morbius, lost in admiration of his own knowledge and intellect, found that out too late. He had to destroy a whole planet to make things right.

So hiding your id monster away is dangerous. But if you can look at your dark side, see what's in there and name it, you've got control. Put those hidden desires on an id-monster t-shirt for all the world to see -- and tell the world where to get off, when it deserves it -- and you've got a shot at controlling your own destiny. And not blowing up the world because you couldn't acknowledge your deep-down monster. Or sabotaging yourself at every turn in life without ever figuring out what's going on.

My great thanks, then, to Ed Roth: for convincing some of us to wear our id-monsters on the outside instead of hiding them inside.

Ed Roth died about ten years ago. He had his ups and downs in later life. When custom car culture waned in the late '60s, Ed drove down a few bleaker roads. Eventually he found his way back to the freeway by converting to the Church of Mormon -- not a path I would have chosen, but I'm not Ed Roth. He eventually worked out a way to be both a good church elder and a cool old dude who drew Rat Finks and monster cars. And he never stopped building unusual and innovative vehicles.

A few years back the Petersen Automative Museum in LA, that grand repository of SoCal car culture, held a special exhibition on the life and works of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth. There were drawings, pictures, the cars themselves. And a large model Rat Fink in a top hat, standing in front of an ever-lit neon Iron Cross.


Somewhere out there on the two-lane highways of the dark side of the soul, Ed Roth is breaking the speed limit in a three-wheel VW-powered trike -- he invented them, by the way -- while Carl Jung sits in the back seat and screams "That all you got, old man?!!!"

And they're both smiling, two Germanic good old boys with great power of creativity and imagination. And the smiles are identical.