Early OOH hula girl mug ?

Has anyone else picked one of these up? I came by this mug this weekend. It is quite a bit smaller than the average OOH mugs. Duke has a similar mug shown on page 91 of Tiki Quest. The book states that the mug came in two sizes R-73A and R-73B. The A model being the smaller mug. The one I have has different paint and the image is much more crisp leading me to believe it is an early piece. The mug I have has no number marking. Just wondering if anyone has one of these small mugs they could post a pic of. Might be cool to see the variants that may be out there. I've posted a pic of the hula mug next to an average OOH mug for comparison. Thanks.

Uncle T

I have two versions of the smaller mug. One is marked R-73A JAPAN and the other R-73A TAIWAN plus a Made in Taiwan label.

You can see pics on my Ooga Mooga page. From the pic it looks like yours is more detailed.

http://www.ooga-mooga.com/cgi-bin/all/collection.cgi?mode=gallery&user_id=1199

I can't tell from the pics, but does the glaze have any crazing, or does it look fairly new?

Trav that was actually the very first mug I found at a thrift store and mine is identical to yours down to the markings on the bottom.

Thanks guys. No crazing but defiantly an older surface. The cold glaze paint is in beautiful condition. This is a very thin mug as many of the early OOH mugs are. I have noticed that many of the OOH mugs are not numbered. Liz I couldn't pass this up for the price :D

On 2014-03-03 16:38, uncle trav wrote:
No crazing but defiantly an older surface.

Definitely, not defiantly-----The Spelling Police

You got me!! Stupid spell czech thing

Based on the fact that it is marked "Japan", we know it's '60s-early '70s. Orchids later mugs were made in Taiwan. Here are the same 2 mugs from my collection. Mine is actually marked "R73A" & the glaze on it is fresh as a daisy, as well. The detailing on yours looks better than mine, so I would guess yours is older. Nice find, Trav. I've only found 2 of these in all my travels.

[ Edited by: Big Kahuna 2014-03-03 17:21 ]

Here's mine...
The detail on your mug Trav is particularly nice.

[ Edited by: Atomic Tiki Punk 2014-03-03 17:37 ]

I want the one to the left, Lance. Is it marked SP?

yes, the brown Hula Girl mug it is marked SP, Rick
also my Orchids mug is marked R73A Japan.

Thanks for all of the input guys. Here is a better shot to show all of the detail. The color is a bit off in this shot.

My hula mug is also smaller and I believe the same as yours Trav. Mine is also not marked with an item number on the bottom.

Here is the one in my collection.

• Dale

I am just glad you found something to buy :)

I think I bought mine for $0.99 like 4 years ago. But those were simpler times..haha

Love this little mug Trav.. I just picked up three last month..
Mine's the Taiwan Version.. Couple pics since that one wasn't shown yet.. :wink:

Uncle T.
I have the same mug as your hula girl. I too wondered about its smallness. No jokes Lance!
Cheers

Damn!

It is strange that they made two sizes of this one mug. Juice mug, kids mug? I wonder how long it took for the molds used to make the mugs to degrade in detail. I'm sure as soon as the mold was ready to go that they pumped out thousands at a time. Most early mugs of any company have nice detail that gets very bad in the later mugs.

On 2014-03-04 05:32, uncle trav wrote:
It is strange that they made two sizes of this one mug. Juice mug, kids mug? I wonder how long it took for the molds used to make the mugs to degrade in detail. I'm sure as soon as the mold was ready to go that they pumped out thousands at a time. Most early mugs of any company have nice detail that gets very bad in the later mugs.

I have kind of a theory about that. Everybody probably knows of the tiki salt and pepper shakers they used to sell at Walgreens a few years back? Well, once my wife took mine off of my high-top table to use and didn't put them back. One of them got shanghi'ed by my then 2 year old daughter and broken. The next season (they seemed to show up just about springtime every year, I went to purchase a couple more. Got them home and they were considerably smaller and less detailed than the ones before. What I figured happened is that they didn't have the original to make a mold of, so they made the mold of an exsisting shaker. The original figure that the original mold was probably bigger than the shakers to allow for shrinkage during fireing in the kiln. The new shakers shrunk down smaller than the originals and with less detail. May be what happened to the mug also.....later mugs made from a mold made from an original mold, thus shrunk smaller than original. Anyway, it's a theory.

howlinowl

I think you've nailed it there howlinowl.

If a remold was the case it's strange that the smaller mug was designated the R73-A and the larger mug R73-B. Anyone have a pic of the larger mug? From the photo in Tiki Quest it looks as though the hula girl on the larger mug does not have a lei around her ankle as the girl on the smaller mug does

Moulded items are usually 10% smaller than the item that you take the cast off.

This is mainly due to the clay slip shrinking as it dries out.

Here is my big hula girl

On 2014-03-04 14:18, uncle trav wrote:
If a remold was the case it's strange that the smaller mug was designated the R73-A and the larger mug R73-B. Anyone have a pic of the larger mug? From the photo in Tiki Quest it looks as though the hula girl on the larger mug does not have a lei around her ankle as the girl on the smaller mug does

I don't know if my theory holds true in this case or not. Could be that they produced the large mug, and was still using the original mold when they decided to ramp up production with a 2nd mold. Discovered that the new mold made smaller mugs and added the A and B suffex to the end of the model number at that time using "A" for the smaller and "B" for the larger (because if you had a restaurant and wanted to purchase the larger ones to match exsisting inventory....you'd assume that "B" is bigger than "A". Wouldn't have needed to differentiate between the sizes until they were produced.

Just like my "Die Nasty Wholesale" scorpion bowl (I always wanted to type that). Here it is in ooga-mooga:

http://www.ooga-mooga.com/cgi-bin/all/mug.cgi?mode=view&mug_id=663

Not very detailed. But it is very similar in design to this:

http://www.ooga-mooga.com/cgi-bin/all/mug.cgi?mode=view&mug_id=2912

Orchids of Hawaii. Maybe "Die Nasty Wholesale" purchased a Orchids of Hawaii bowl and pulled a cast off it???

Once again, I could be blowing this all out of my...... but with the extensive "borrowing" of menu images and such, it wouldn't surprise me if a few "bootlegs" of exsisting bowls were made.

Wish I still had the Walgreen's shakers to take pics of to show size and detail differences...

howlinowl