Tom Daniel

Tom Daniel was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1936; Atlantis Models said he would have turned 90 on 1 December 2026. He grew up in the Los Angeles area after the Second World War, fascinated by custom cars and hot rods and always drawing them. After a high school field trip to the Art Center School of Los Angeles, he applied and was accepted on the strength of his high school portfolio alone, while still a high school student. He spent four years there studying colour and perspective, drawing, illustration, clay modelling, painting and automotive and product design, and said he spent his final year drawing futuristic cars.

In 1959 Daniel was hired by General Motors and moved to Michigan to work in its styling studios. In the truck studio he designed the production hood used on Chevrolet and GMC light and heavy trucks from the early 1960s, and he also made design studies for commuter trains and switching locomotives for the Electro-Motive Division. Returning to Southern California, he was called up to the Naval Air Reserve during the Cuban missile crisis and then worked for North American Aviation, where he worked on console designs for the Apollo programme.

Throughout these years he drew a monthly "Off the Sketchpad" feature for Rod and Custom magazine. In 1964 the Hollywood customiser George Barris, facing a deadline, asked him to design a car for a new comedy series about a family of monsters. Daniel produced the design overnight, and it was built as the Munster Koach for The Munsters. He also designed Grandpa Munster's dragster, which he named Drag-U-La, and the Batcycle with its detachable sidecar for the Batman television series. Barris built the cars and was often credited with them.

His Rod and Custom work came to the attention of Monogram Models of Morton Grove, Illinois. His first design for the company was the Beer Wagon, a hot rod based on an old chain-drive Mack truck, and his second was the Red Baron, a Model T bucket topped with a chromed German helmet, released in January 1968. Both sold around two million kits, and the Red Baron was described as the best-selling plastic vehicle model kit of all time. Monogram gave him a free hand, and between 1967 and 1975 he designed more than 75 kits, typically one a month, including the S'Cool Bus, T'rantula, Paddy Wagon, Dragon Wagon, Bad Medicine, Tijuana Taxi, Sand Crab and Street Fighter. After Mattel bought Monogram in 1968, many of his designs also appeared as Hot Wheels cars, and the Red Baron became the second best-selling Hot Wheels car. A full-size Red Baron built by Chuck Miller in 1969 won the Oakland Roadster show sweepstakes.

In the 1970s he worked with the Italian company Bburago, adding custom touches to its Porsche 911 and Datsun Z kits and creating the Tom Cat Cruiser, and he also designed for Testors. He served as executive vice president of the Rocketman Corporation, working with his friend Gary Gabelich on the American Way, a planned rocket car meant to break the land speed record, a project that ended with Gabelich's death in 1985. In later life he painted pop art car pictures, landscapes and railroad art, and designed new kits for Atlantis Toy and Hobby, which bought the original Red Baron tooling and reissued many of his designs.

Daniel lived in Utah in his later years and kept in touch with fans through his website, tomdaniel.com, which sold prints of his artwork and posters of his designs. He described himself simply as an industrial designer and said he drew on memories of his boyhood to shape his models and their names. His paintings were exhibited in Shifting Gears: The Art of Tom Daniel at the Thunderbird Foundation for the Arts in Mount Carmel, Utah, in 2012.

Tom Daniel died on 19 October 2026, aged 89, about six weeks before his 90th birthday. His family announced his death on his official website, saying they planned to continue the site after taking some time. The place and cause of death were not made public. Atlantis Models, which had worked with him on reissues of his kits, said it had spoken with him the week before and called him a true visionary who helped shape the golden age of plastic model kits. Tributes were also published by the Model Car Hall of Fame, the iModeler community and hobby shops.

Daniel's designs defined the playful, outrageous side of American model kits in the late 1960s and 1970s, and many builders credit his kits with first drawing them into the hobby. The Red Baron became one of the best-selling vehicle model kits of all time and a lasting Hot Wheels favourite, and the Munster Koach remains one of the best-known television cars. He was inducted into the Model Car Hall of Fame as an automotive legend and as a designer, in 2009 and 2018, and his kits continue to be reissued more than fifty years after they first appeared.