![]() Further accolades came to the mighty Rat the following day at the Rat Fink Reunion, which was held at Mooneyes, a custom car shop in Santa Fe Springs that was the site of a similar gathering a year ago. ![]() Rat Fink’s return was made official on Friday when he was feted at the opening of an exhibition of work by Roth, Stanley Mouse and Robert Williams at the Julie Rico Gallery in Santa Monica. Last weekend was a big one for Rat Fink, who’s been drifting in and out of the public eye for four decades he became virtually invisible during the peace and love reign of the Hippies, then began to creep back into view with the arrival of the Punk movement. A demented ancestor to Bart Simpson, best described as Mickey Mouse’s evil twin, the gnarly little beast has come to be synonymous with a pedal-to-the-metal, anti-authoritarian approach to life, and for nigh onto 40 years 13-year-old boys have instinctively recognized that to embrace Rat Fink is to shout hooray for weirdos! More than a mere insignia, however, Rat Fink is nothing less than a philosophy of life. ![]() Formally launched in 1938 when the first organized drag race was held at Muroc, Calif., local car culture reached a hipsters’ apotheosis in the ‘50s and ‘60s when the Beat Movement and hot-rod culture converged (the dry lake beds at Muroc were lost to the hot rodders in 1939 when they were appropriated by the military and transformed into Edwards Air Force Base). But to describe Rat Fink as a cartoon character does him a gross injustice, because Rat Fink is so much more.įor starters, Rat Fink is the unofficial mascot of Southern California hot-rod car culture. What, you may well ask, is a Rat Fink? Reducing it to its most fundamental level, Rat Fink is a cartoon character generally traced to artist Ed “Big Daddy” Roth sometime in the mid-’50s.
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