Gallery: The Bizarre Rise and Fall of the Tiki Bar
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In the 1950s and 60s, an epidemic of island fever swept the United States and led to the construction of tiki bars from Redondo Beach, California to Lower Merion, Pennsylvania.
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While most of the Tiki culture has receded into niche subcultures, the Zombie, Mai-Tai and pu pu platter continue to be mainstays at American Chinese food restaurants.
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As an American design motif, Tiki stretched beyond wooden and stone figures to include anything that was vaguely Polynesian, nautical, and handcrafted.
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Sets from these movies were often installed in bars and restaurants kicking off a tiki craze that would spread from coast to coast.
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Tiki bar drink menus were chock-a-block with violations of modern political correctness. Structural racism? Try a mug literally shaped like a woman of color.
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Just so we're clear, tiki bars were places where your grandparents would burn a Saturday night drinking out of replica human skulls.
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Tiki was a Polynesian god/man that filled the role of the first man, like the Biblical Adam. Pacific islanders carved statues in his honor as a form of ancestor worship and eventually, all carvings of this type came to be called "tikis."
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Fascination with all things Pacific began when English explorer Captain James Cook made contact with islanders in the South Seas starting in 1769.
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Cook's tales of exotic people and places inspired writers like Herman Melville and Jack London to hop ships bound for Oceania and precipitated Gauguin's sojourns in Tahiti.
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"Don the Beachcomber" was a reformed bootlegger who kicked of the tiki bar movement, invented the mai-tai, was featured in *LIFE* magazine, and provided R&R as a decorated military officer in World War 2.
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Hollywood started cranking out island-focused features and by the 1920s a quarter of recorded music sales were Polynesian melodies.
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The tiki look was applied to apartment buildings, motels, bowling alleys, hair salons, restaurants, and bars.
