Post #207431 by Humuhumu on Fri, Jan 13, 2006 5:56 PM

I've been dying to tell this story for a while now, and today the wait is over!

This past summer, to celebrate the new Enchanted Tiki Room merchandise that Kevin Kidney & Jody Daily created for Disney, they were invited to do a presentation to the NFFC (that's a huge Disney fan organization) at their big annual Disneyana convention in Anaheim. Kevin & Jody, who have a pretty darned good sense of show themselves, decided to go beyond just a simple "here's what we're selling" spiel, and instead developed a whole performance emceed by King Kukulele. There was singing, there was whistling, there was comedy bits. It was a smash success.

For the show, they wore their reproduction purple Enchanted Tiki Room shirts, one of the more anticipated items in the new merchandise. Kevin & Jody also happened to have the original, vintage, matching purple Enchanted Tiki Room dress; they had pressed the Powers That Be at Disney to also do a repro of the dress, and they were laughed at -- their coworkers said no one would be caught dead in such a frumpy, dated dress! So, only the shirt was made.

Kevin & Jody asked me to participate in their show for the NFFC, and I got to wear their vintage Enchanted Tiki Room dress, which was a dream. We were quite a sight, all four of us in our matching purple Tiki Room prints, and after the show was over we went to Disneyland in them. It was a blast. I posted the story of this event, and the pictures from it, on Tiki Central in this thread:

http://www.tikicentral.com/viewtopic.php?topic=15605&forum=1

Fast forward a bit -- Kevin walks into the Disney offices one morning to see this picture of me, EVERYWHERE:

It was on everybody's desk, including the VP, and one of the women in the apparel group had it blown up to be a few feet tall and mounted on posterboard. You can probably imagine Kevin's "what the...?!?" expression that morning, trying to figure out why he was seeing a picture of his weekly drinking buddy all over the place at work. He asked around to find out where everybody had gotten the picture, and discovered that someone at Disney had -- totally independently from any efforts of Kevin & Jody -- found that Tiki Central thread about the NFFC show, and the picture of me in that dress, and had flipped their lid! All of a sudden, they now LOVE this dress, and decided to make it!

They had already used all of the purple fabric for making the shirts. They were already underway on developing a reproduction of the vintage green version of the shirt, so they decided to make this dress in the green fabric.

So, this spring, you will be able to purchase this dress, in the same print but with a green background instead of purple, thanks to this bizarre turn of events!