Post #782046 by AceExplorer on Mon, Dec 4, 2017 5:27 PM

Good information there from Thor, thanks to JasonMa for putting that up. I know my initial reaction to the mug was wrong - I thought too quickly of how "the bean counters" got an opportunity and then ran away with it. Emotion overcame reason.

But 12 to 24 hours later I saw more posts and I thought again about what Trader Sam's really was, and then the light went on. That's when I posted again that this mug DOES fit in Sam's. I'm not sure if I pulled my foot outta my mouth, but I sure hope so. And Thor is right - if the edition size isn't ginormous, these will be very valuable. The mugs depict - as Thor helped make clear - something with a long and beloved history in the Jungle Cruise.

And you know what's really embarrassing for me personally? I once took a fellow co-worker for an in-depth behind-the-scenes tour of the park and one of my stops took us INSIDE the rock with the hidden pneumatic valves and showed him what I knew was the legacy technology that ran the animation for that portion of the ride - the elephant pool. Dang it...

I would still argue (friendly) that the "tiki mug" moniker has become generic for various highly stylized and whimsical drinkware. This caused confusion when Disney introduced this mug as a "tiki" mug. Unfortunately not everyone sees these things the same way we do, so to us it was a big deal. But to everyone else -- "COOL! JUNGLE CRUISE ELEPHANTS!" and that was the end of it.

So glad that Jason posted additional in-depth information. That's going to remain an important and lasting record in Google of what that mug is really about and how and why it came to be.

So looking back I am both happy and sad -- happy that the mug fits well into the context of Trader Sam's, and sad that I was so quick to judge and did so badly. To quote someone very famous, "Doh!"