Hula Girl Dashboard Dolls: How Cultural Obsession Led To The Legendary Accessory

Americans have a fondness for automobiles that people from other countries may not fully understand. We are inherently predisposed to make our car an extension of ourselves. We bedazzle the exterior with shiny wheels, fanciful paint jobs, and exotic exhausts. We deck out the interior with all manner of trinkets, tokens, and tchotchkes, all to better reflect our individuality. And perhaps no trinket is more iconic than the classic hula girl, swaying her hips on the car's dashboard.

Shortly after World War II, fuzzy dice around the rearview mirror took the country by storm, and entrepreneurial-minded folks quickly realized that kitschy car accessories were a hot commodity. Sometimes, it was at the cost of distorting and wrecking the cultural and historical significance of a certain thing; such is the case with the iconic image of the hula girl dashboard doll, another fad that came on the heels of the fuzzy dice craze.

Hawaii wasn't even a state when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941. It was annexed as a U.S. territory in July of 1899 and became the 50th state on August 21, 1959. During those 60 years, mainlanders became obsessed with Hawaiian culture. 

Early Hawaiians did not have a written language, instead using music and movement — hula dancing – to pass on their history, mythology, and culture to those who came after. However, the eventual Western version of hula we think of when we picture a dashboard hula doll and the actual hula tradition is very different. Everyone from soldiers to sailors, merchants, whalers, artists, and writers contributed to the distortion of hula dancing, combining Hawaii's dancers with those from the South Seas (think Tahiti and Polynesia) to form a sexually charged, mashed-up stereotype that was far from the truth.

In 1903, the U.S. government funded the creation of the Hawaii Promotion Committee, and local merchants and other hospitality industry leaders began organizing tourism for the first time, and travel brochures and souvenir postcards displaying the Westernized version of Hawaii's hula dancers began flooding the country. 

According to Constance Hale, author of "The Natives Are Restless: A San Francisco Dance Master Takes Hula Into the Twenty-First Century," this started an era where the government wanted to present Hawaiians and hula girls as inviting to tourists. By the late 1920s, passengers arriving on the islands were met by female dancers performing hulas and greeters who placed a lei around their necks. It was about this time when the first hand-painted hula dolls wearing grass skirts and leis appeared and were sold as souvenirs.

Trips to the islands weren't cheap, so Ernest Gantt opened Don's Beachcomber Café in Los Angeles in 1934 to give mainlanders a taste of the island life. It looked like a grass hut with a thatched roof and was bedazzled with things that gave it an island vibe, like fishing nets, canoes, tiki torches, made-up Polynesian gods, and, of course, hula girls. Victor Bergeron opened a similar pub in Oakland, California, Hinky Dink's, which would later become the world-famous Trader Vic's. 

Three significant events in 1935 kicked tourism to Hawaii into high gear. In January, American aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart became the first person to fly alone between Hawaii across the Pacific Ocean to the mainland (Oakland, California, specifically). Towards the end of that same year, Pan American Airways established the first regularly scheduled trans-Pacific air service to Asia through Hawaii. Lastly, Eastman Kodak introduced Kodachrome color film that brought the majesty and colors of Hawaii to life in a way never before seen in photographs.

Pearl Harbor was first established as a U.S. naval base in 1908. Sailors and soldiers grabbed virtually anything they could find with a hula girl on it (magazines, playing cards, etc.), all of which were brought back stateside after the war. Much like fuzzy dice, the hula girl became even more of an obsession that spread across the nation.

According to Collector's Weekly, the original hula girl dolls made by deLee Art Company and Hawaiian artist Julene Mechler eventually gave way to cheaper versions sometime after the war. These plastic "dashboard dolls" had magnets attached to their feet so they would stick to car dashboards, which were still mostly metal at the time.

The economy boomed after the war, and American companies (like Ford) that had been exclusively building equipment for the war effort quickly shifted production to consumer goods. People also had more free time to travel, and Hawaii — with its tropical sun-drenched beaches — was becoming more accessible thanks to widespread air travel.

Theories suggest that the fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirrors of hot rods in the late 1940s and early 1950s came about because WWII pilots put tokens in the cockpit of their fighter planes for luck. The timing of veterans returning from the war lines up, much like the reported first appearance of dashboard hula girls. However, while some sources say these nodders or bobbleheads showed up sometime in the 1950s, others say they started in Hawaii and were brought back to the mainland by soldiers.

"Tiki culture" (including the ever-popular hula girl) coalesced with another Hawaiian icon: surfing. Jack O'Neill invented the first wetsuit in the early '50s, making it possible for surfers in the cold waters of California to hit the waves. A few years later, the first lightweight fiberglass surfboards were produced, making surfing even more accessible and boards customizable.

Finally, the early 1960s ushered in beach movies and music. Elvis Presley made three films that took place in Hawaii and/or centered around surfing: "Blue Hawaii" (1961), "Girls, Girls, Girls" (1962), and "Paradise, Hawaiian Style" (1966). At the same time, The Beach Boys hit it big with surf-centric songs like "Surfin' Safari" (1962), "Surfin' USA" (1963), and "Surfer Girl" (1963), all of which seared the beach lifestyle into the American psyche. 

While no one can pinpoint an exact time or place when hula girls first appeared on dashboards, it's likely the culmination of several variables. The regular souvenir hula doll had been around for some 30 years, and the postwar economy was a launch pad for products and industries that formed the United States as we know it today. Tourists and veterans may have come up with the idea of affixing the dolls they got in Hawaii to their dashboards to keep the memories alive long before they became hip-swirling, mass-produced tchotchkes.