My Tiki Collection

Here are five tikis (and Rowlf, who is not a tiki but is 3 1/2 inches tall, so you can get an idea of scale) I bought in four different places. (As always, click on any picture to embiggen.)

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The collection started out small, when I found the two leftmost tikis in the above picture at Goodwill for $1.21 each. (Not the bargain it seems, as I'm about to explain.) The middle figure, not in the top picture, is Jose, the star of The Enchanted Tiki Room, in front of a tiki totem as seen in the attraction. (I bought Jose for full price, new, so he is included here only for the sake of completeness.) This is what Jose really looks like when photographed properly:

The rightmost tiki in that picture I found several years later, at a different store. All three of the "carved" tikis have the same tag on them:

These lovely statuettes were made by Greenbrier International, the company behind Dollar Tree. Which means I paid 42 extra cents for the first two tikis. After I found all three of these, my tiki collection stagnated a little, except for the notable addition of my lovely wife who occasionally goes by the nickname of "Tiki."

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Finally, I found another, and it's a doozy.

This lovely beast is a souvenir from The Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii. I'd tell you about the history of this location, but the souvenir tag says it all:


Well, not ALL actually. The Center is (and I know exactly how ridiculous it is to bring this up in a celebration of tikis largely created by nonPolynesians) apparently remarkably inaccurate about culture and history. I don't wanna get into a whole debate here about how Mormons profit off a falsified native culture, but I'm pretty sure that's not right. With that said, I'd probably go, if only to make a Mormon serve me coffee (which is on the menu).

The best part about this souvenir is that it sings. When you squeeze its belly, as requested, you hear this:
http://www.mediafire.com/?gwibcgbwjmc6wxb

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And I just found this one last week, and he's the biggest and prettiest of the bunch. Not to mention the only one made of wood.


Just in case you can't tell, the base reads "Hawaii." (Though there's a tiny sticker on the bottom which reads "Made in The Philippines." Which is only slightly further from Hawaii than China, home of my Dollar Tree tikis.) This one also has a lovely hangtag:




Ku Tiki is indeed the God of strength, and the Monkey Pod tree he was carved out of might have better been used to clean the air, as mature trees remove a tremendous amount of CO2 each year.

The hangtag also has a page of some Asian characters I can't name. They don't appear to be Japanese kanji, or either traditional or simplified Chinese. Can anyone identify them, and verify that page is, as I've assumed, a direct translation?

So, there it is. My complete (to date) tiki collection. When I find more, I promise to update here.