Kitschy Kitschy COOL : Tiki became tacky after its heyday in the 1950s and ‘60s. Now the style is back, in all its campiness.

Tour the older neighborhoods and business districts of Orange County, and you’ll see remnants of a paradise lost.

Here and there stand aging A-frame motels, restaurants and apartments with tiki torches, totems and palm trees--all part of the tiki style that blossomed in the 1950s and ‘60s, when Americans became enamored of the South Pacific.

Paradise, in the eyes of many, meant a tropical oasis populated by exotic blooms (plastic flowers would do in a pinch), fierce wooden tikis that guarded kidney-shaped swimming pools and flaming tiki torches.

By the ‘70s, tiki was deemed tacky, and much of the colorful decor and architecture was either torn down or modified beyond recognition. Now some people have again discovered paradise.

They’ve begun to appreciate tiki’s kitschy charm.

At the Anaheim Museum, guest curators Kevin Kidney and Jody Daily have assembled an exhibit of tiki that might make you want to dance the hula and sip mai tais out of clam shells.

Visitors to “Tiki--Native Drums in the Orange Grove” (through Sept. 21) will find themselves in a hut straight out of “Gilligan’s Island,” stocked with island-inspired furnishings, tiki gods, vintage pictures of local architecture, grass skirts and other trappings of the Polynesian pop era.

“People are really interested in tiki. It has this very cool retro image,” Kidney says.

Today people love the campiness of tiki, but in its heyday tiki appealed to mainlanders because they wanted to alleviate the sameness of suburbia with something exotic. They decorated their houses with shell lamps, bamboo and rattan furniture (usually made in New Jersey), coconut ashtrays, shell curtains and plastic pineapples. They could go to pottery shops and buy huge tiki totems for the yard.

“People could buy whole living-room sets with tiki gods carved all over them. Needless to say, they’re not pretty,” Kidney says.

They installed tiki torches on their patios and held backyard luaus, playing island music, dancing the hula and serving tropical drinks in hollow coconuts or tiki mugs. They prepared exotic food supposedly consumed by islanders that was usually “Chinese food with pineapple,” Kidney says.

“You could lend an exotic feeling to your mundane life,” he says. “But we weren’t very authentic. The word ‘tiki’ does not even exist in the Hawaiian language.”

Tiki was not based on any one authentic Pacific Island culture but rather was a curious conglomerate of Hawaiian, African, New Zealand and other influences mixed with the mainland’s loud, streamlined or “googie” style.

“It’s a mishmash,” Kidney says.

Mainlanders copied the islands’ idols or totems and sold them as tikis, turning them into salt and pepper shakers and other knickknacks. Some tikis in the exhibit are miniatures of the towering stone gods of Easter Island.

“In these days of political correctness, I’m waiting for this to become controversial. Tikis are based on gods from the ancient days, and we’ve hollowed them out and put frozen drinks in them,” Kidney says.

Polynesian pop culture sprang from World War II, when soldiers stationed in the South Pacific returned with photographs, souvenirs and stories of their island adventures.

Despite the war, “they were sentimental about this exotic place,” Kidney says.

Hawaii became a state in 1959, and, as more Americans began to vacation there, fascination for the islands grew. Books such as James Michener’s epic “Hawaii” (1959) fueled the imagination of stay-at-home explorers, Kidney says.

They had visions of tiki gods, birds with colorful plumes, spouting volcanoes and lush tropical landscapes with birds of paradise and palm trees.

“People were Hawaiian-crazy,” he says. “Here was a bunch of mainlanders, and suddenly they had this exotic place right here in America.”

One record album in the exhibit, “Ritual of the Savage,” features a cover illustration of a young couple in a hot embrace, surrounded by tiki gods.

“You just know their names are Doris and Bob,” Kidney says.

In 1963, when Disneyland opened its Enchanted Tiki Room, built to look like a thatched island hut populated by wisecracking tropical birds, “it heralded the acceptance of tiki as mainland Americana,” Kidney says. During the ‘60s, the Orange County Fair had a shop devoted to tiki.

Tiki flourished throughout Southern California, especially in Orange County, as local attractions sought to draw tourists who couldn’t afford the flight to Hawaii.

“People still didn’t travel as much as they do today. California was as close as many could get to Hawaii,” Kidney says.

Cocktail lounges, restaurants and motels would install tall tiki totems and flaming tiki torches, some made out of neon--the perfect blend of Hawaiian and mainland motel/auto cultures.

The structures were built to resemble ceremonial houses of Polynesia. They had giant A-frame roofs with beams jutting out three or four feet to resemble the stabilizers on outrigger canoes.

“It was a colorful fantasy of a place most people would never get to go to,” Kidney says. “But you could have a big outrigger beam sticking out of your house.”

Tiki-type architecture survives in Orange County, especially around Disneyland.

Among the examples of tiki that Kidney and Daily discovered:

* the Samoa Motel on Katella in Anaheim;

* the Villa Samoa apartments in Buena Park, with tall tikis guarding the pool;

* the Pitcairn motel on Harbor Boulevard in Garden Grove (its landmark neon sign is adorned with flickering tiki torches);

* the Kamia Village Apartments in Garden Grove, with a giant, carved tiki stationed by the cabana.

* the well-preserved Hawaiian Village condos in Fullerton, with A-frame buildings set amid a lush tropical landscape; and

* the Royal Hawaiian restaurant in Laguna Beach, with tiki totems ringing the courtyard.

“By ’66 or ‘67, people tired of tiki. It began to seem cheesy and cartoony,” Kidney says.

As the years passed, many establishments uprooted their totems, allowed their torches to burn out and modified their outrigger-style roofs.

“A lot of these places are just a ghost of what they used to be,” Kidney says. “Colorful tiki was considered an eyesore in the ‘80s. People made everything beige, sandy and white. It was spick-and-span.”

Many buildings had their outrigger beams chopped off.

“We were visiting a condo, and they were talking about chopping off the extensions on their A-frame roof. We said, ‘You can’t do that. You’ll ruin it,’ ” Kidney says.

Kidney and Daily work as artists for Disneyland Entertainment, designing parades and shows such as the recent “Lion King” show.

“We’re very interested in style and in history,” Kidney says.

When Kidney heard the Anaheim Museum was looking for a summer exhibit, he volunteered to put together a tiki display. The curators found most of their tiki treasures at thrift stores.

“We went on a crusade looking for plastic flowers and palm trees. They didn’t have silk flowers back then,” Kidney notes.

They also collected plastic leis, tiki mugs and statues, tiki albums and grass hula skirts.

Typical of the era: Dole Pineapple’s pamphlet on “How You Can Give Hawaiian Parties” (sample tip: build an outrigger canoe out of pipe cleaners) and the “Kodak Hula Show” record album, featuring “music for your Hawaiian pictures and parties.” Grass skirts in neon hues glow under a black light (another innovation of the times).

Such finds are getting increasingly scarce and expensive.

“This is probably the last summer we could do this,” Daily says. “Tiki is going mainstream.”

The Anaheim Museum, at 241 S. Anaheim Blvd., is open Wednesday through Saturday.