Thank hippies for those 90s show car paint jobs with dragons and tigers.

Where do people get the idea to paint dragons and tigers on their cars? Who came up with the idea to paint life-sized women all over their cars they'd have on display for all the world to see at a show? While people have been custom-painting cars since the very first horseless carriages, and flame paint jobs can be traced to the mid 1930s race cars, it was the counter-culture hippie movement of the 60s which birthed the kind of intense artistic inspiration required to paint a 6-foot-tall dragon down the side of a show car.

Youth culture changed rapidly through the 60s and while the hot rodders and car customisers of the 50s loved creating wild paint jobs it was the rise of hippies and the counter-culture movement which really showed us all how insane paint could get.

Hippies? Yes, you read that correctly: hippies. Those famously environmentally-conscious huggers of trees who loathed wasteful "gas guzzlers".  

It was in the late 60s that pop and rock music festivals became events which drew hundreds of thousands of young people together from all over the world. Woodstock, Altamont and the California Jam,  to name just three massive festivals, were replicated all over the world and became rallying points for creative youth wanting to hang out and express themselves. 

With money tight for most, the most creative groups would buy old buses and vans, then decorate them in psychadelic motifs. And everyone saw them. Media focus on hippie cutlure was at its peak in the late 60s and the sight of these lurid buses and vans packed with the controversial hippies drew widespread media attention, which in turn inspired younger people coming through.

By the early-to-mid 70s the hippie culture had withered but music festivals and youth culture were still massively popular. Young people were hanging out at rock shows, and the idea of travelling around to watch rock concerts with your friends all in one vehicle, which could double as a place to sleep, was really picked up as something people could get behind. 

The issue was, despite the vans being easier to drive and park than old buses, they were incredibly boring to look at. So the customisers stepped in. 

By '73-'74, the custom van and 4x4 culture (including dirt biking and off-road racing) were taking off thanks in part to muscle cars being killed off by high insurance and petrol costs, and this led to young people wanting to decorate their basic, slab-sided work vans to stand out and show some individual flair... sound familiar?

Fat wheels, chrome side-pipes, fuzzy dice and all the stuff people were doing to hot rods and muscle cars were easily transferred over to these new rolling billboards on wheels.

Their huge slabs sides also made them ripe for adding a splash of colour. Now, they didn't start out with top-to-bottom murals featuring vikings wielding swords at fire-spewing dragons on top of a volcano. LIke the custom cars of the 50s, things started milder and rolled up as people sought to one-up each other.

Above is a typical mild van set-up with a pop-up sunroof, fog lights, side-pipes and fat wheels. 

As the 70s rolled on and people started wanting to push the boundaries, custom painters were adding pin-striping and traditional custom car touches like panels, lace paint and fades. Then, the air-brushing trend hit, allowing full scale paintings to really blow the creativity up a notch...

By '77-'78 the van craze was in full swing all over the world, including Australia. Full-size vans weren't as popular as our home-grown "panel vans" or "panos" down under, as these were based on regular family cars like the Holden Kingswood, Ford Falcon, and Chrysler Valiant. The wildest vans were show-only rigs with insanely detailed, velvet-lined interiors and mirror-finish undercarriages, custom bodywork out the wazoo, and engines designed to score points not run numbers.

As with all trends, the pendulum never swings one way alone. By the early 80s the vanning trend was pretty much done in favour of the Pro Street and Street Machine movements, which favoured speed, race-prepped engines, and sheet-metal drag-inspired interiors over velvet trim, detailed murals, and chrome carburettors. 

The wild paint trend briefly popped up in the late 80s with graphics designs, but really didn't make a return until the late 90s and the rise of the sex-spec/MAX POWER/Hot Import Nights style of car building. 

But it was all possible thanks to the hippies.