American and Japanese Hot Rodding Meet in Mooneyes Documentary

Its big eyes goggle at you from hats and T-shirts, from the back glass on station wagons and the inside of toolboxes. The Mooneyes logo has graced the side of land speed streamliners, nitro funny cars, and even an AMG GT3 endurance car. It's probably just below the Hooker Headers heart in recognizable American automotive branding, but how many people know the story of Moon Equipment Company's creation, or even more interesting, of its rescue and regeneration as Mooneyes after the death of its founder, Dean Moon?

Not many, we'd guess, which is why we were so happy to get a preview of the forthcoming documentary Craft of Speed, which follows the brand from its inception in the early 1950s to its current iteration.

Dean Moon was a Southern California hot rodder in the 1940s. He worked in his father's café out in Norwalk, and souped-up a '34 Ford behind the restaurant. This was a time of great innovation for aftermarket components, when a clever fabricator could make a name on a single hop-up part, be that head, cam, intake, or fuel block. The fuel block is where Moon began, with a machined billet piece he designed in high-school shop class. A fuel block works to equalize pressure on a multi-carb setup, like many of the hot-rodded flatheads and four-bangers were using at the time. Moon quickly realized he needed to cast the blocks if he wanted to make any number of them, and his success with that led to additional product designs, from engine kits to the spun aluminum wheel covers known now as "moon caps."

By 1954, Moon Equipment Co. was a recognizable name among dry lakes racers and car customizers. In 1957, Moon bought a small shop in Santa Fe Springs and hired an artist from Disney to design his eye-catching (ha) logo. Craft of Speed showcases some of Moon's famous cars, but also establishes the site of Mooneyes as a hub of performance development. The first Cobra Carroll Shelby ever shoved a V-8 in was in the back garage of Moon Equipment.

If the Mooneyes story ended with Dean Moon's death in 1987, it would still be an important part of automotive history, but what makes it stand out from other stories of early hot-rodding is what happened next.

Moon's World Travels

One of the more interesting details in the documentary is that Dean Moon knew that hot-rodding had international appeal. Moon was one of the first American drag racers to ship a car over to England, where he ran speed trials. He also worked with Nissan in the 1960s on its Japanese Grand Prix R381, thus cementing an affection for the Moon mooneyes in generations of Japanese car enthusiasts. This comes into play later in the film, as a Japanese hot rodder named Shige Suganuma begins selling speed parts in Yokohama, working with Moon, and a college pal, Chico Kodama (a Japanese-American hot rodder Suganuma met while in the states for school) to stock his shelves with American offerings. When Moon died in 1987, it made sense to Suganuma that he and Kodama buy the business and continue the legacy. Which brings us to about halfway in the story.

"The hard part about this film was that it's an expansive story," says Craft of Speed director Ming Lai. "It's 30 years of Dean Moon's history. And then it's 30 years of Shige and Chico's taking over that important legacy. And if you wrap it together, it's really the history of hot rodding from then until now and what it's becoming now. It was a huge challenge to try to capture all this. The film is a little bit longer because of it, but I didn't want to shortchange history."