From the award-winning director Ron Mann comes Tales of the Rat Fink, a wildly inventive biography of Renaissance man Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, who engineered a shift in mid-twentieth century culture with his customized cars, ‘monster’ T-shirts and America’s alternative rodent: Rat Fink.

The subject of Tom Wolfe’s essay The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby, Ed Roth helped fuel the ‘Kustom Kulture’ / Hot Rod movement of the 1960s in Southern California. Hot Rodding grew from crude backyard engineering where performance was the bottom line into a refined art form where aesthetics were equally important. His garage/studio evolved into the blue-collar equivalent of Andy Warhol’s Factory with dozens of employees helping Big Daddy create. Revell produced model car kits patterned after his creations and Rat Fink was soon joined by other gross, disgusting creatures driving the coolest hot rods. Alienated adolescents who knew they’d never fit in now had their own heroes: Drag Nut, Mother’s Worry, Mr. Gasser, and other members of the Rat Fink family. The message was clear (even if it wasn’t the one Roth had intended): Ugly is beautiful, and being a weirdo is cool. It was a lesson some would never forget.

Mann’s largely animated documentary features the voice talents of John Goodman, Ann-Margret, Jay Leno, Brian Wilson, Tom Wolfe, Matt Groening, Robert Williams, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Billy F. Gibbons and The Smothers Brothers.