Post #550855 by bigbrotiki on Sun, Aug 29, 2010 1:36 AM

Yes, Tiki was alive and well in 1965 - sort of: Mainly among those who had worshiped it before, and who carried his torch for several years on. But around that time, the generation that had grown up with Polynesian pop and pushed it to its pinnacle with Tiki had involuntarily passed its scepter, and culturally they did not matter any longer. Tiki lingered for quite some time with those folks, but grand projects like the Mauna Loa, and the new The Tikis in Lake Elsinore, were doomed. The young generation had taken over and had other gods.

You list most of the elements, like the Beatles, the Vietnam war and the resulting student revolts. Then there was women's lib, Black Power and Wounded Knee, in general a growing awareness of the crimes that Western imperialism had committed in the rest of the world. When so many things that the parents had stood for turned out wrong, Tiki could not be right. Another death stab for the kind of innocence that allowed Americans to create such dreamworlds as Tiki was the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

I wrote here elsewhere that Tiki's heyday was actually really brief, from the late 1950s to around 1963. That is when most of the Don/Vic/Steve franchises, Tiki apartments buildings and bowling alleys were built, when Tiki mugs came into use, and the name of Tiki was invoked on menus and neon signs. Everything that was invented during that period in terms of Tiki style was merely repeated later, it was the creative peak of the style.

I also mentioned before that to me, the kind of labeling of style decades as "the 50s","the 60s" and "the 70s" is, though convenient, not accurate for what happened. If we look closer, the styles of the late 40s and the early 50s were much more alike, and so were the styles of the late 50s and early 60s. And then definitely, the late 60s and early 70s formed their own style period. So "55-65" and "65-75" would be much more accurate style period denominations.

So I would amend my evolution chart of Polynesian Pop in that manner:

There really was no Tiki in the early 50s. Even though Stephen Crane opened the Luau in 1954, recent postcard comparisons prove that it stayed Pre-Tiki in style until in the late 50s, when Crane began franchising out the concept with his Kon-Tikis: Tiki in name and appearance. One conclusive date for Tiki becoming the logo of Poly pop is the opening of Tiki Bob's in 1955. And Trader Vic menus began to sport Tikis. But it took several years from then on for Tiki to become the pop culture icon we know and love him as now.

My favorite example of that development was DC's recent finding of the name change of Dobb's Luau in Atlanta: "Luau" being a traditional Poly pop concept, was updated in 1962 into "Dobb's TIKI" ! (an example I gladly pointed out in my "Sound of Tiki" CD booklet)

By 1962, Tiki had become "the newest name in fashionable dining" -to those folks who would drive their T-Birds to fashionable supper clubs back then, that is.

But because of the violent nature of the ensuing generation gap, by 1965 Tiki was on the fast track to become OLD-fashioned. Tiki burned brightly but briefly -one reason it disappeared so completely, and was so completely forgotten by the 1980s.

[ Edited by: bigbrotiki 2010-08-29 03:57 ]