Awesome! Penang, Malaysia is home to the world’s largest toy museum!

With my penchant for toys and comic books, as well as a healthy dose of Peter Pan syndrome, how could I pass up the Toy Museum, curiously located on a small island in Malaysia?

Scratch resistance is futile.

It’s billed as the “largest in the world” and the “only of its kind in Asia.”

So, it was a natural place for me to visit. My imagination ran wild. I visualized toys from all eras and cultures, with a dose of history to make it an educational experience at the same time. Maybe not as educational as the moral at the end of every episode of He-Man, but I was sure to learn something along the way.

Instead, I learned nothing new. I only got a reminder of the phrase “caveat emptor” which I had known ever since Greg Brady bought a piece of shit car on the Brady Bunch in 1972.

The Admission:

20 Ringgit ($7US). Perhaps not a king’s ransom, but that was triple the cost of seeing Tron: Legacy in a Malaysian theater the day before. I assumed it would be an experience taking several hours, while simultaneously creating and bringing back memories.

The Display:

The display was like a 1970s era comic book store. Rows of steel shelving, filled nearly to bursting with toys. The shelving was straight out of a hardware store, with scratched sheets of plexiglass taped to the front. Yes, TAPED. With clear plastic packing tape.

Harry Potter toys on the top shelf, a few more on the second shelf. And what the hell is on the bottom? I have no idea.

Layer upon layer of dust was on the toys, and the few pieces of original packaging displayed were faded almost beyond recognition. Hard to fathom, especially when you consider the recency of the pieces inside.

The Presentation:

Pieces were loosely organized by category, with groupings of Star Wars toys, Harry Potter toys and other franchises placed in close proximity to items from the same lines.

But then, inexplicably, there were many large displays that held not toys, but oversized movie displays. Life-sized models of Kung Fu Panda, Spider-Man, Shrek, the Silver Surfer, 3 (!) Lara Crofts and several others had been obtained along the way. Not really toys, but they were actually the most interesting part of the exhibit, since they’re not always easy to come by.

So it was disappointing that those items were spoiled by the inclusion of other toys, completely unrelated to the larger model. A life-sized Seven of Nine figure with Monsters vs. Aliens toys in the case? Ohhh-kayyyy.

The Sorceror's Iron-clad Apprentice?

No history of the items was included in any of the displays. Nothing about the date of the toy, the history of the toy or even who or what the toy was. Like you would typically find in a museum, I would have expected at least some minimal effort to identify the toy and give a bit of history. Not for every piece, of course, but at least for some key pieces (if there were any).

Well, there were a few little sheets of paper if you looked hard enough. Like a 5 page description of the Star Wars films, apparently pulled from the web.

The Collection:

This brings me to the biggest disappointment. My expectation was that it would include a) toys and b) something of historical value. Those are assumptions that are inherent in using the words “toy” and “museum.”

At least this one made me feel at home. It's like my old office.

• It was almost entirely action figures, like an amped up version of Steve Carell’s apartment in 40 Year Old Virgin. Where were the Playskool items or Fisher-Price collections? Legos? Spiro-graph, Etch-a-Sketch, Lite Brite. Hell, how about a Play-Doh Fun Factory? Literally millions of creative toys have come and gone over the years, but none of those were present. The average yard sale in Des Moines has a more varied collection. Instead, you get 743 different Spider-Man figures.
• It was almost entirely movie, TV and/or comic related merchandise with a few others mixed in.
• It was almost entirely comprised of items from the last 15 years. UNLIKE Steve Carell’s figures, all of them seemed like items you could find walking down a Wal-Mart aisle in 2003, even if some are billed as “collectors items” by the Mattel marketing department.
• There were no classic toys, nothing from the 50s, 60s and if anything was from the 70s or 80s, I couldn’t pick them out. Even the Star Wars toys were all re-releases or recent collections, nothing from the original releases. There was nothing from other cultures, showing playthings around the world, except for some action figures (natch) based on Japanese anime series and a few Asian influenced dolls that weren’t described.

They mostly come out at night, tipped over, dusty and broken. Mostly.

Corrective Action:

Two things could turn this experience around:

1) Clean it up. Charging 20 ringgit for a 30 minute walk-through should make enough money to dust the place once in a while, at least. Change out the scratched plexi-glass and light more than the top shelf of each display (you needed a flashlight to see what was on the bottom shelves).

2) Bill it as the world’s largest collection of action figures, not toys. That’s still cool and I probably would have still gone. Maybe that isn’t as simple as calling it a “toy museum” but it’s misleading to use a broad term like “toy” when the collection is so narrowly focused. Even if they use a subtitle: “Toy Museum: The World’s Most Astounding Collection of Action Figures”

With over 100,000 pieces, it’s an amazing accomplishment. They need to treat it like one.