Meeting Ed "Big Daddy" Roth
UPDATE: A real car crazy documentary on Ed Roth is now airing on Amazon Prime. Be a cool cat and chase it down.
I sat down and talked to man who invented the Mega Cycle Transporter and a slew of weird cars and toys that absolutely consumed my childhood, along with millions of other snot-nosed kids across the country. Then working for a publisher back in the 1980s I finally met him in person.
My story ran in Truckin’ magazine. Unless you were buying car magazines back then chances are you’ve never seen these images of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and his Mega Cycle Transporter.
There are plenty of wild, crazy, and often fantastical stories of “Big Daddy” Roth and his mad creations. Some of them factual, and others born from foggy memories. Years have a way of eroding even a well-known story.
But the popular story about Roth’s Mega Cycle Transporter is something I happen to know a little bit about.
I was standing beside Roth himself when he explained how and why he re-created the famous Mega Cycle Transporter in ‘85, and it was illustrated in a cover story I wrote for Truckin’ magazine (Sept 1985 issue).
As I mentioned in my previous post about Roth and his creations, I met him at his home in Los Angeles County while on assignment for the magazine.
He was about to relaunch the Mega Cycle Transporter for a second time with the help of his old business partners at Revell, the U.S. model toy car company that had already produced millions of his earlier creations like Mother’s Worry and Mr. Gasser. Re-launch is the keyword!
The Mega Cycle Transporter wasn’t a new creation, as Roth said at the time. Far from it.
As the story goes, it was first conceived back in the late ‘60s in a drawing by Ed Newton. Roth liked the drawing so much he decided to start creating it for real.
Roth told me, he built the Mega Cycle Transport originally for the car show circuit, but had never completed it. His exact quote in ‘85 was…“I started this project not expecting to finish it.”
While the “uncompleted” Mega Cycle Transport went from car show to car show, Roth’s interest in it waned, and he either sold or traded the Mega Cycle Transport, according to various stories. It ended up in many hands that is for sure.
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In fact, Roth admitted that he dropped out of the car scene altogether at some point, and totally lost track of the creation. He actually got a job at Knott’s Berry Farm doing lettering and other paint work for the amusement park.
Sometime in the late ‘70s or early ‘80s Roth and his son Darryl decided to track it down. What they found was a shell of its former self. It had been badly abused and one story goes onto say it was used as a dog house at a junkyard. Yikes.
By the time Big Daddy and his son found what remained of it they knew they had to piece it back together again. Major components were missing though and it needed a complete restoration to finish it off if Revell was going to show any further interest in it.
According to Roth, Revell was looking for another one of his cool cars to bring to market after selling millions of his other creations as scaled-down plastic models, during his heyday.
I don’t believe that the Revell model was ever produced though.
Roth had an “off again, on again” relationship with Revell, according to my notes from the original interview. The only person who knew why Revell didn’t produce it was Roth. Maybe his sons might shed some light on the story today.
Then again, not all of Roth’s creations were produced in scale by Revell. Maybe they just didn’t think it would sell. It’s anyone’s guess.
I was able to locate the original published article that came out in the September ‘85 edition of Truckin’ magazine thanks to eBay, which just added more mystery to the story behind the Mega Cycle Transporter.
While I shot hundreds of photos and spent the entire day with Roth, the published article was brief, but colorful. The feature story was shot at El Dorado Park in Cypress, California, which was only a short drive from Roth’s home.
So why did Roth decide to wait more than 20 years to relaunch Mega Cycle Transporter? No one knows, and Roth wasn’t talking. But as he shifted through some memorabilia at his home garage I suspected at the time that Roth wasn’t the most organized person on the planet, and perhaps the original concept behind Mega Cycle Transporter was never fully thought-out to his personal satisfaction.
Yet, there it was now completed and parked only a few feet from him. With a Pete Santini paint scheme, the beast looked awesome. Santini was one of the West Coast’s finest painters.
The only reason the publisher wanted the story to begin with was because Roth said his inspiration for the Mega Cycle Transporter came from the El Camino, a truck like vehicle. He wanted to create something that took the basic El Camino shape into the future, and he loved the way his Harley looked on it.
I think he accomplished that goal.
