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Before leaving for Singapore, I made a Google Map of places that I want to visit. Two weeks is a pretty short time to see everything but we’ve managed to squeeze in a lot of places.

Anyway, today Ville, Antti and I decided to visit the Mint Toys Museum behind the Raffles Hotel. It’s a small museum with a very large collection of toys from different time periods; anything from original Matchbox car collections to one of a kind pieces. The museum’s collection spanned over 5 floors with different themes on each floor: super heroes, classic toys etc..


“Whoever dies and has the most toys wins”; it reads in the lift at the Mint Toy Museum.

The collection started off with tin toys from circa 1950. All sorts of cars, planes and spaceships sat next to each other on glass shelves in big cabinets. Hundreds of different sizes and colors. Made you really feel like a little kid again :) We arrived at an opportune moment as there was a staff member taking a small group of, what appeared to be journalists, around the museum and explained in detail about each important piece. There was for example an original Forbidden Planet movie poster that was worth 18,000 USD and also a one of a kind tin tank, also valued at roughly the same amount of money.

There was also James Bond, Thunderbird and even Bruce Lee toys. Star Wars toys were well represented, with the museum showcasing some original hand painted movie posters. I took quite a lot of pictures there but as we weren’t allowed to use a flash and the rooms were quite badly lit (not to mention my camera is shit), not all the pictures turned out as well as I’d hoped. I’ve nevertheless uploaded most of the pictures to Flickr for your viewing pleasure.

Another staff member I talked to said the museum has just 10% of its toy collection out at one particular time and that they change the collections around very 2-6 months. The tickets are also valid for 2 months so if we had more time, I’d probably have to go and visit the museum again.

The lobby had a small gift shop with replica collector’s edition toys on sale. I’m not a big fan of gift shop crap but this was different. They had some of the same toys for sale as upstairs so I had no choice but to buy an awesomely cool tin rocketship. It’s the coolest toy I’ve ever had. When I get home, it’s so going in my living room.