How Disneyland became SoCal’s unlikely gateway to tiki culture
Tiki, an offshoot of the Midcentury Modern movement, flourished in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, but began to experience a decline in the ’70s. Thus, by the ’90s, there were concerns at Disney that the Enchanted Tiki Room — the pivotal 1963 attraction that pioneered audio-animatronics — was no longer in vogue, its singing birds, totems and flowers a relic of another era. The company explored some early concepts to remake the Enchanted Tiki Room. One idea was to transform it into an ecological, save-the-rainforest show. Another was to redesign it with a “Lion King” theme. “Let me tell you, we hated it,” says artist and designer Kevin Kidney of the latter concept. Kidney, who worked in Disneyland’s art department in the ’90s, says he and his longtime collaborator Jody Daily were “terrified” the Enchanted Tiki Room would disappear, so much so that they began making fliers to advertise the show and putting them up all over L.A., in restaurants, bars and museums. “We started an underground movement to save the Tiki Room even while …
