After the highly successful bright-yellow Mysterion and hot-pink Road Agent (another good-selling Revell model), Ed crafted the dark-blue, somewhat boxy Orbitron in 1964, possibly in as little as one or two months' build time. But it was so well-known and amazing (it, too, was a Revell model), that a complete, totally accurate replica of this vehicle showed up at Cobo Hall and was immediately snapped up by Ralph Whitworth, who is building a huge new automotive museum in Winnemucca, Nevada, which will include special Ed Roth and Von Dutch wings (stay tuned for more on this soon).īut the one Ed Roth fiberglass, bubbletop, asymmetrical show car that never seemed to be all that conspicuous either by its presence or by its absence is the one he called the Orbitron.

They gave the remains to someone in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who gave them to a kid who may have tried to restore the Mysterion in his parents' basement but then had to get rid of it.

In a lengthy, humorous account told in my book, Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth, His Life, Times, Cars and Art, custom builders Jack Walker and Doug Thompson were able to acquire the unwanted 'glass body from a custom shop in the Midwest in the '70s and seriously contemplated dumping the asymmetrical nose in the freeway median, lighting it on fire, and telling the cops it was part of a spaceship that fell out of the sky. We knew that the twin-engine, chrome-frame, bubbletop, Cyclops-nosed, and aptly named Mysterion had self-destructed from the weight of its two big-block Ford engines while being trucked from show to show, and little more than the front axle, wheels, and tires had been returned to Roth. We knew where Tweedy Pie was, but another well-known Roth machine-unquestionably his wildest of all-had been conspicuous by its absence for decades.

Orbitron weights