Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth's real-life cartoon cars

Watch: I collect psychedelic 60's rides

Built in 1964, the Orbitron was lost for decades before it was finally found being used as a dumpster outside a sex shop in the town of Juarez, Mexico, in 2007.

Orbitron was the creation of Ed Roth, a founder of the Kustom Kulture car craze in 1960s Southern California. Roth was one of the first to seriously modify cars, not for performance, but to turn them into rolling works of art. His cars, many of which were not-quite street-legal, featured bright colors, bubble windshields, bizarrely shaped bodies, crazy lights and brightly colored faux-fur interiors.

Roth's Orbitron was his paean to the relatively new technology of color television. The light from each of its three colored headlights combines to create white light while driving down the road, were this car actually legal to drive on the street.

According to owner Beau Bachman, who runs the Los Angeles car customizing shop Galpin Auto Sports, and who restored the Orbitron to its original glory, the lighting effect actually works.

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