VAN NUYS : He’s Been Called Goofy, but Car Honors Mickey

One look at his 1989 Buick Le Sabre and people ask Fabio Rodriguez if he is crazy. But no one asks him if he has lost his marbles.

From bumper to bumper, more than 30,000 multicolored glass marbles adorn Rodriguez’s four-wheeled “Fantasia,” the latest of his offbeat projects.

“They have called me crazy so many times,” the 48-year-old Rodriguez said Wednesday. “But they admire the artistic marbles and the patience, for you have to do it one by one. This is like a mural on wheels.”

For the last seven months, Rodriguez has spent most of his time at his condominium/art studio in Van Nuys--away from his Mesa, Ariz., home--where he painstakingly glued the imported Mexican marbles on his Le Sabre.

If this seems madness, there is a method--an ongoing dream to create one-of-a-kind cars. Rodriguez’s previous creation, a 1969 Honda covered with 27,000 dimes, was sold in 1991 for an undisclosed sum to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, which put the vehicle on display at its London museum.

The story behind Rodriquez’s current project is almost as bizarre as the car. The inspiration for “Fantasia” came not from some childhood affection for marbles, which Rodriguez played growing up Colombia, but from a rodent.

A Mickey Mouse fanatic, Rodriguez has amassed more than 1,500 Mickey Mouse collectibles--from watches to train sets. Rodriguez wanted to create a car that honored his hero, but knew that gluing a thousand Mickey Mouse figurines, pens, phones and other collectibles would look tacky, at best, and get stolen, at least.

“You can’t put $10,000 worth of collectibles on top of a car,” Rodriguez said. “It wouldn’t be a carjacking. It would be a Mickeyjack.”

Instead, he took an idea from one of Mickey’s films.

“If you remember the movie ‘Fantasia,’ it’s the most colorful movie he made,” said Rodriguez.

For the next two years, Rodriguez searched for the marbles he needed to create a cruising cascade of colors, finally finding them in Mexico.

Using a special mixture of three glues, Rodriguez spent at least 5 1/2 hours a day covering doors, hubcaps, fenders, etc. with the marbles, which more closely resemble oblong stones than the playground variety. The car also features green rhinestones and colored wooden sticks on the front grille.

To honor Mickey directly, each door carries a silhouette of Mickey’s head, re-created in dimes and quarters. Known for his abilities as a “coin artist”--he once covered a suit of armor with 6,258 dimes--Rodriguez also glued more than 4,500 dimes around the windows and on the hood to create an eagle.

Now, Rodriguez is hoping to sell his creation. He works part time as a Spanish-language commercial and television announcer, as well as on cartoons, but he says it is not enough to support a wife and three kids.

Until the sale, Rodriguez just wants to keep from losing his marbles. So far, he’s been lucky: “Fantasia” has been driven through three car washes without rinsing off a single dime or marble. And the car security system shrieks a wicked alarm.

But if the youths who admired “Fantasia” on Wednesday at Balboa Park Lake were any indication, Rodriguez should not leave the car alone for too long.

“It’s nice,” one 17-year-old teen-age girl from Reseda said innocently. “I’d like to steal it.”