Post #418207 by bigbrotiki on Mon, Nov 10, 2008 2:27 PM

Mr Bali Hai, that is a unique design I have never seen before. There are other non-Tiki, Indonesian faces on some of the big ones out there, but this one is especially cool. I hope some other folks have some surprises in store like that, because, honestly, to me the giant fork and spoon sets represent the bottom of the barrel of not only Tiki carvings, but of tourist art (which is already less cool than Tiki!):

The Tiki ones all look alike, and some are so badly carved you cannot make out what the figures are supposed to be. Before EVERYTHING that had a Tiki on it became collectable, they used to used to hang around en masse in thrift stores here. Kind of like the native-girl-with-movable-legs nut crackers, of which the early ones possessed a basic level of carving artistry, but later examples devolved into "nameless pieces of hacked wood". Here is a small set with the basic Ku design that I speak of (it resembles that blocky cheap tourist Tiki that was sold by the thousands in Hawaiian convenience stores):

I am sorry to have to be so blunt, Bongo Bungalow, you might have fond childhood memories of these and your mom's story is truly classic, but I just wanted to remind folks here WHY the art of mainland Tiki is so special: Because of its high artistic quality and ingenuity, things that are absent in most of these mass-produced, generic gag souvenirs ....in my (un-)humble opinion.