Destination Branson Pt 2: The World's Largest Toy Museum

Welcome back to Branson, everyone. In the next two entries of this series I'm going to tell you about our experience at one of the most unique group of museums we've ever visited. Along the way I will be sharing pictures, and links to videos I took along the way, which I've downloaded onto my You Tube page.

With our friends and their family involved in wedding activities: church rehearsal, rehearsal lunch and other preparations that go along with a wedding, Paula and I had most of the day free to explore the area.

We decided to check out the "World's Largest Toy Museum" located on Country Boulevard 2.5 miles from our hotel. Along the way we passed a lot of other attractions: the water tower that doubles as the town's marquee...

...The Hollywood Wax Museum...

...and a distant view of the Branson Ferris Wheel.

I will have additional pictures of these attractions and more later in this series. 

From the time you see the marquee and the bus in the parking lot the Toy Museum you get a good hint as to what awaits you inside. But you can't imagine just what a million toys looks like.  

The outside of the building reminds me of the facade of an old time amusement park fun house. 

Inside we found a couple of things that surprised us. First of all, admission not only included the toy museum but a complex of 5 others as well. They are: 

The Harold Bell Wright Museum-A memorial to a writer whose fictional novel about life in the Ozark Mountains first brought the area into national spotlight.  

Sterney's Bear Museum-featuring stuffed bears hand crafted by the Stearns family in Stotts, MO since 1981. 

National BB Gun Museum-A collection of over 500 BB guns by Daisy, Winchester and more, prints of classic advertisements. They feature guns associated with Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger. 

World of Checkers Museum-A room devoted to the history of checkers of all kinds, from the 1700s to today. There's also the opportunity to sit and play a game or two. 

Paul Harvey Jr. Museum-A series of rooms and displays that recreate how it was for the son of the famous broadcaster while growing up in the 50's.

In addition, there was another room in the complex devoted to something that always takes me back to my childhood. More on that later. All of these were open to us for just a $19 admission price. Now, let's get back to the toy museum.

As most tourists spots do, our tour here began in their gift shop. We were escorted to the suggested starting point by one of the employees. There he gave us some basic guidelines and advised us on what path to follow so we'd end the tour back in the gift shop.   

Before I get into the many pictures I took, I want to explain a couple of things about the museum.

This was not the spacious roomy type of museum you'd see in a big city. It was very crowded and the room to move around was limited. There was a lot of stuff in a relatively small space. It reminded me a lot of some of the places Mike and Frank go through all the time on the TV show, American Pickers.

It felt a lot like going through someone's attic. There were even a couple of full sized cars and or vehicles in the middle of all the display cabinets. The three floors were filled to capacity. The best way I could describe it was that it was an organized hoarder house. But with a million toys how could it be anything else. 

Also, the lighting throughout the museum was not very conducive to taking pictures. The glare of the florescent lights took away from the quality of the photos I took. But I did the best I could. 

Finally, there was so much stuff to see that I didn't want to miss any of it. But to shoot everything I liked would have taken all day and I wanted to be in the moment.  These pictures are just a sample of what was in the museum.

This wind up toy is one of the earliest Mickey Mouse toys I have ever seen. I would be very interested in finding out more about it.

While the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were a bit after my time, they are important to a lot of people who grew up in the 80s & 90s. To them, this case full of TMNT toys is probably rather impressive. 

Robots have always been one of my favorite toys. This case had several generations of toy robots on display. The one I was most impressed with was the large BR-9 robot from Lost In Space.  The smaller model in the right hand corner is just like the one I have.

Paula found a Pebble's doll she had when she was a little girl.

Along with the robot, Lego and Disney displays (you'll see those last two in videos later) the toys based on real space travel were among my favorites. However I didn't take the time to take any decent pictures of the case; but I have to include them. Here's the only picture I got.

 On the bottom floor of the museum was a vendor display case once used to sell roasted nuts. But in this case it was used to hold one of my favorite collectibles, Pez Dispensers.

The display had a sign that gives a brief history of the products origin.

Now it's time for the some videos. All these links will take you to my You Tube channel page. Because of the limited file size allowed for videos on this blog (100mb) I had to download them there.

There are so many Disney toys in this video that I can't begin to talk about all of them. But I was happy to see the Goofy telephone just like the one that I have in my collection.
World Largest Toy Museum Disney Display.

 This display of Lego sets and other building toys is interesting but I don't understand why the Rubik's cube is included. Can you figure it out?
Lego & Other Construction Toys

Let's now double back to Pez dispensers. As someone with a very modest collection myself, I really liked this display case.
Pez Dispensers Display

My 2 1/2 year old grandson is going through a phase where he loves toy tractors. When walked to the 2nd floor of the museum and saw this room of displays, I had to video it for him to see.
Tractors and Farm Machine Toys

At this point in our tour we found ourselves circled back around to the gift shop. We bought a couple of souvenirs for our grand kids. We left the toy museum building but our tour was not over. After some lunch we would return to go to the other side of the lot and enter a 2nd building with the other museums.

I'll share the pictures and details of our time touring those in my next series post. Hope you enjoyed my recollections of the best toy collection I've ever seen. And there's more where that came from. Come back again soon for the rest of our day at the museums.