Post #668554 by creativenative on Sun, Feb 24, 2013 12:04 AM

Thanks for the "props" for southseascinema.org There are about 8 South Seas Cinema Society members that contribute to our research. I prefer to call myself the compiler of data but yes I'm the webmaster. I also do lots of research myself but today for example I got a call from a TV expert from Makaka and yesterday an email from L.A. to add a few titles to our grand list (a cartoon episode from Hanna Barbera and Movie shorts by Gaston Méliès brother of early film legend George who sent Gaston to the South Seas in 1913). The website does not cover all our categories of productions set in the Pacific islands.

Last year we also did a grand list (22 pages & growing) of Polynesian Pop titles (with scenes of Polynesian influences set outside of Oceania - from back yard & private luaus, sets in Tiki bars & restaurants, Polynesian themed frat parties, etc.) in movies, TV, toons and others types of major productions. (Sorry this list wont go on the website yet - cause its my Masters paper subject and if I post it now I can't use it for my school paper) Might be in a book in a few months though.

About 5 years ago Sven asked for information on Tikis in movies and when we went through our database we realized that we didn't do a thorough job of documenting tiki in South Seas films (over 600 of them). WE use a lot of key words in our title descriptions for searches but the important word "tiki" wasn't done well. We have been going back and watching a lot of movies & TV shows to make sure we don't miss "tiki" in our descriptions so in the near future one can look up tiki (a very key word in this genre) and find all the titles with tiki in it. I have over 15 pages (and growing) of corrections and additions (including the word "tiki")to put in the website. We are also compiling a large image database of the Poly images in this genre of screen captures and short clips. Now you know where I get all my screen captures.

And yes you are right Chin Tiki was only a Polynesian restaurant in the Detroit area. ONLY the name and its front type was Chinese. But I'm into images and that is a great Poly-Chinese image. Last and coincidentally, someone took this picture yesterday of myself, in the middle, and a couple of other South Seas Cinema Society members. On the left is the infamous DeSoto Brown, author, Hawaiian historian, mega collector and major contributor to our research from Bishop Museum and Dan Long (on right), movie theater builder and also major collector. We are at the annual Hawaii Collectors Show where I doubled my collection of ceramic tikis. Help! I got the bug and I can't kill it! (Do I want to? ....Noooo!) Everyone on TC is in the same boat. Good tiki hunting everyone!