If the vehicles at this year’s Cars at the Capital exhibition look familiar, that’s because you may remember them from much smaller versions: Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s 1961 Beatnik Bandit hot rod and the 1967 Dodge Deora were part of the first group of 16 Hot Wheels cars in 1968. They were both inducted into the National Historic Vehicle Register this year.
The Bandit and the Deora grew out of the “Kustom Kulture” movement that Tom Wolfe wrote about for Esquire in 1963, when the world became fascinated with surfing, hot rods, and other totems of Southern California teen culture. The Beatnik Bandit, Wolfe wrote, was “one of the great objets of customizing,” a phrase that surely resonated with its creator and the kids he saw “dancing the bird, the hully-gully, and the shampoo.” Roth, to Wolfe, was “the Salvador Dali of the movement—a surrealist in his designs, a showman by temperament, a prankster.”
The car’s bubble top, its joystick that in theory handled every function of driving (steering, shifting, braking, throttle), its blinding Naugahyde interior—no wonder this thing got famous as a Revell model kit even before it became a Hot Wheel. (The actual Bandit moved around via trailer.)
And then there’s the Deora, which in Hot Wheels form typically included a pair of removable surfboards in the bed.
But the Deora’s roots were in Detroit, not SoCal. Larry and Mike Alexander, brothers who’d built a custom business in Motor City, hired wunderkind designer Harry Bentley Bradley to turn a Dodge A100 pickup into a Slant Six-powered dream machine whose windshield swung up to allow access to the cabin. Bradley soon moved on to Mattel, where he designed the first batch of Hot Wheels.
The Beatnik Bandit will be on display from Thursday, September 19, at 7 PM until Sunday, September 22. The Dodge Deora will be on view from Sunday, September 22, until Tuesday, September 24, at noon. Here’s a map that shows where to find them. Free.