Post #587971 by bigbrotiki on Thu, May 5, 2011 5:16 PM

On 2011-05-05 13:19, Trad'r Bill wrote:
Sabu - good eye, I was thinking the same thing... the lines inside the letters match my sign very closely. I think the sign was probably based on the menu lettering, or vice versa.

I looked through dozens of bamboo lettering fonts on Archiva Tropica and didn't see any that looked like the menu/sign: http://www.arkivatropika.com/cgi-bin/tags.cgi?tags=%22bamboo%20lettering%22

Here's a side-by-side shot:

It seems very likely that the sign once hung at one of the Tiki Bob's locations. Any other explanation I can think of seems too far-fetched.

Trad'r Bill

Waitaminnit: The "C" in the menu has THREE separation lines on the bottom, the sign only TWO! :wink:

A stunning discovery! Great eye, Sabu. I have photographic TIKI memory, but it does not extend to Bamboo fonts :) . These two are clearly related! If the "Transmission tradition" of menu art that we have found in the copying of logo Tikis applies to Tiki fonts, it initially seems hard to say which came first, and from where. But with a little logic, we might get close:

Tiki Bob' was the unwanted stepchild of Trader Vic's on Cosmo Place. So Vic's would never have copied anything from Bob's. Bob's (as a place) WAS a "copy" of Vic's, yes, but but not THAT literally. It's unlikely that the graphic artist of the Bob's menu went to Cosmo place (IF it had hung there) and sketched the sign for his menu job. The easiest way would surely have been that the sign maker got a copy of the Tiki Bob's menu and carved the font from it - per order of Tiki Bob's, of course.

Tiki Bob's Sacramento was too far away for the sign to have made it back to town, and Tiki Bob's Mainland seems to have been very under-decorated with Polynesian items. So: My vote goes to the original Tiki Bob's!