I simply wanted to announce the creation of what hopefully will be dubbed by avid collectors around the world as THE ULTIMATE TIKI MUG COLLECTORS Facebook Community Web Page. My name is Mike Gangi. I am an avid collector of Tiki from Madeira Beach, Florida and currently serving in the United States Navy. Tiki collecting....the thrill of the hunt so to speak...has become a part of my lifestyle and I wanted to build a community focused on the good times and cheer that TIKI CAN BRING! If you have a Facebook account, please visit the site and join! I will be looking for some other people to help with the admin part of the site in the future as it grows. If you are interested just drop me a line! My plan is to try and make this the premier collectors site on Facebook...a place where Ooga-Mooga frequenters can share their love of collecting and living the lifestyle! Hope to see you there! The site is:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Tiki-Mug-Collectors/126655444033756

This site brings up an interesting point:

At what point will the amount of Tiki Revival mugs overtake the amount of classic restaurant mugs (as in mugs produced during the mid-20th century)? I am talking about individual designs and their sculptural variations (not the same mug in different colors or with different names on it). I am no good at statistic estimates...

And also: Is it even feasible for a new Tiki fan to start collecting vintage mugs nowadays?

Is it even feasible for a new Tiki fan to start collecting vintage mugs nowadays?

I don't want vintage for the most part cause its extremely over price. Why would I want to pay $100.00 of a mug that was free with a drink ($0.00), stolen ($0.00), a 1990s ebay find ($2.00) or a garage sale find ($2.00).

When I can buy a $15.00 Tiki Farm mug for the price of $15.00.

On 2011-06-12 05:27, bigbrotiki wrote:
This site brings up an interesting point:

At what point will the amount of Tiki Revival mugs overtake the amount of classic restaurant mugs (as in mugs produced during the mid-20th century)? I am talking about individual designs and their sculptural variations (not the same mug in different colors or with different names on it). I am no good at statistic estimates...

And also: Is it even feasible for a new Tiki fan to start collecting vintage mugs nowadays?

Wow really good questions Bigbro........i can only speak from my own experience and collection of nearly 3,000 mugs...i started collecting vintage mugs several years before ever buying a new (tiki-revival) mug...by this time i had collected almost every vintage mug i could find. i had about 800 mugs at the time..since then i have collected over 2,000 revival mugs.. there is a good chance that the amount newer mugs have long surpassed our vintage ones by quite a bit. i wonder what ooga-moogas numbers are on this????

as far as being feasible to collect vintage today??? yes...vintage mugs have a let's say feeling to them. an allure of.. what was it like there, then.. what if this mug could talk. what if it could take me back ??etc???...at any rate all this is imho

[ Edited by: ron-tiki 2011-06-12 06:54 ]

I think I read (on the Tiki Farm website perhaps) that Tiki Farm had out-produced all vintage manufacturers combined as of a couple of years ago. How this statistic is quantified, I don't know. And I may be miss-remembering.

Interesting point Big Bro. I was just on ebay looking through tiki mugs and was noticing that most people now days are bidding on newer mugs much more than older mugs, in fact the bid prices of newer mugs are much higher than the prices of the vintage mugs. I was also wondering if the old mugs are not as interesting or as precious as they used to be. Now this does not include some of the super rare vintage mugs.

First, I appreciate your enthusiasm. I like to share my collecting bug with others if I think they have the tolerance listen to me, so I get the desire.

That said, I have some misgivings about Facebook being a good medium for this but perhaps you have a plan for how to deal with the inherent limitations imposed by the Facebook layout.

(I'm not even going to get into the data collection privacy issues since I figure people using it either don't care or don't know enough to care.)

The nice thing about sites like Ooga Mooga and Tiki Central is that they are designed to be relatively easy to search and navigate. Facebook by design is focused on the RIGHT NOW and while they keep everything ever posted (oops, maybe I will stray into that territory a little) it's difficult for users to go back through it in any meaningful way and they have no choice at all in deleting or modifying content. I find it to be a terrible interface. That's me. Lots of people use it but then lots of people used and were happy with their gawdawful smart phones until Apple came out with the iPhone.

My dos centavos. I don't expect to change anyone's mind really, but there you have it.

• fm

On 2011-06-12 07:42, SilverLine wrote:
I think I read (on the Tiki Farm website perhaps) that Tiki Farm had out-produced all vintage manufacturers combined as of a couple of years ago. How this statistic is quantified, I don't know. And I may be miss-remembering.

On 2011-06-12 06:50, ron-tiki wrote:
...I started collecting vintage mugs several years before ever buying a new (tiki-revival) mug...by this time i had collected almost every vintage mug i could find. i had about 800 mugs at the time..since then i have collected over 2,000 revival mugs.. there is a good chance that the amount newer mugs have long surpassed our vintage ones by quite a bit...

Wow, so we are long past that point? I myself know that my "Wow, a new Tiki mug!" reaction has more often become a "Oh, yet another Tiki mug..." response.

I am fascinated by the change from a subculture of "ancestor worship" (the collecting of vintage mugs and other ephemera to understand and appreciate the creativity of past generations) to a fan culture with newly inspired art, and ITS appreciation. When do we reach a point where this becomes a self-perpetuating, new genre, where the context to its origin becomes less important? And at what point does it become just another "collectables" genre for consumers, like Barbie dolls?

That's why I try to create mugs that A.) have a cultural context to a place or a part of Tiki culture history, and B.) have a design that has never been done before as a mug

On 2011-06-12 06:44, teaKEY wrote:
Is it even feasible for a new Tiki fan to start collecting vintage mugs nowadays?

I don't want vintage for the most part cause its extremely over price. Why would I want to pay $100.00 of a mug that was free with a drink ($0.00), stolen ($0.00), a 1990s ebay find ($2.00) or a garage sale find ($2.00).

When I can buy a $15.00 Tiki Farm mug for the price of $15.00.

That is completely false. Vintage mugs can be had for 50 cents in most thrift stores still. I don't even look much and still pass over mugs for less than $5 all the time. There are high priced vintage, but the same is true for new. Check your Ebay completed tiki mugs for reference.

There was a time when freaks and geeks like me and Bigbro were trying hard to at least keep the term "Tiki Mug" meaning some somewhat definable thing, while at the same time "Tiki Mug" manufacturers were defining the term with their products. And, well, they won. Just like Party City defined Tiki for people too.

AND IT SUCKS. THEY ARE WRONG.

I sincerely doubt that Tiki Farm has produced more mugs in their decade of manufacture for the collectors and a handful of restaurants than were made for the hundreds or perhaps thousands of Tiki joints that existed from the 1940s to the 1980s. That is not even imaginable. Perhaps if you want to get at individual designs, it gets closer?

But we at least still have people like Martin Cate and others out there on the fore-front of the "Tiki Bar" defining the drinks in a way that is correct. However, there are plenty out there trying to screw that up too.

Gotta fight the good fight. The Rum Revolution started June 11th, at 5:30PM Eastern Time at Hukilau. Just say no to bad rum! To flavored rum! and to bad drinks!.

Weren't for the most part vintage mugs mass produced drinkware for bars and restaurants whose manufacture was outsourced to large industrial restaurant supply providers who created alongside the tiki mugs all kinds of other everyday unimportant things? I know there were exceptions and I've read about them in detail, but 98% of what I see held up as special for its historical context really doesn't deliver anything greater than any other collected flotsam from another time, say napkins or matchbooks. The latter continue to be produced and may or may not reflect vintage elements, so what's the difference? Design aesthetics are not "owned." They are not fixed in time.

I can see that it is a much more intellectually gratifying pursuit when you are a strict adherent to pre-determined collecting parameters as you are not the author of your story. Your collection reveals itself as the circuitous path of your own excursion through time unfolds. You mentally access your historical database prior to each acquisition. Every time you do that the past is resurrected for you. When a person collects what delights their senses the satisfaction is in possession and living with the collected things. The parameters flex but the experience no less gratifying.

Two different styles of collecting, one no less valuable than the other. You can elevate tiki mugs to iconography status but at the core they are consumer artifacts plain and simple. New or old, both have a place depending on your position as a collector.

The Facebook format just does not work for me.........at all.
Here in California vintage mugs are getting very hard to find in the wild

I see a few Harvey's mugs around in Vintage shops here in Long Beach for way to much cashola
but not the choice "Vintage" mugs I like to collect, Aku Aku, The Islander etc. at all.

I second the notion that the amount of new mugs does not exceed the amount of vintage mugs made back in the day, but at the rate things are going...

I'm still hunting & finding the same way I always did; thrifts, g-sales & fleas...with success. I still find stuff & still pass stuff up alot. it's out there.

On 2011-06-13 12:36, trutiki wrote:
Weren't for the most part vintage mugs mass produced drinkware for bars and restaurants whose manufacture was outsourced to large industrial restaurant supply providers who created alongside the tiki mugs all kinds of other everyday unimportant things? I know there were exceptions and I've read about them in detail, but 98% of what I see held up as special for its historical context really doesn't deliver anything greater than any other collected flotsam from another time, say napkins or matchbooks. The latter continue to be produced and may or may not reflect vintage elements, so what's the difference? Design aesthetics are not "owned." They are not fixed in time.

I can see that it is a much more intellectually gratifying pursuit when you are a strict adherent to pre-determined collecting parameters as you are not the author of your story. Your collection reveals itself as the circuitous path of your own excursion through time unfolds. You mentally access your historical database prior to each acquisition. Every time you do that the past is resurrected for you. When a person collects what delights their senses the satisfaction is in possession and living with the collected things. The parameters flex but the experience no less gratifying.

Two different styles of collecting, one no less valuable than the other. You can elevate tiki mugs to iconography status but at the core they are consumer artifacts plain and simple. New or old, both have a place depending on your position as a collector.

Eloquently put, but I am not buying that "it's all the same" philosophy. To the true Tikiphile, the mid-century Tiki mug cannot simply be reduced to "mass-produced drink-ware":

To the late 20th Century urban archaeologist it was (more often than not) the proof of the existence of a long gone Tiki temple. Its strangeness as an object inspired the further search for other ephemera such as matchbooks, postcards and menus, which then formed the pieces of a mosaic that slowly formed the image of a complete pop culture, a design style that had been forgotten, largely because it had not been recognized as such in its own time.

The whole point of why Tiki style is unique is that it is the only American pop culture I know of that was indeed inspired by such a "mundane" thing as restaurant culture, to form a style that influenced motels, apartment buildings, bowling alleys and home bars. The mid-century Tiki mug stands as the classic symbol of that pop culture. How does that resemble "any other collected flotsam"? And how can post-2000 Tiki mugs claim that same historic complexity - other than being inspired by the original culture, and being the symbol of an artistic revival of it?