Halloween Party @MINT – Museum of Toys

Thanks Omy and MINT Museum of Toys for their private Halloween party last Saturday. This Halloween’s party is specially co-organised by NHB and the MINT Museum of Toys, and facilitated by omy.sg, to show a different side of museums to youths.

For more interesting and different way to experience museums you can log on to NHB’s social media initiative sites www.SeeDifferent.sg or join www.Facebook.com/SeeDifferent.

MINT is located at Seah Street, just right next to the Raffles Hotel. It is a 5-storey well architecturally designed building. The only restriction for this museum visit was that no camera flashes allowed. The reason was because the flash will degrade the paint on the vintage toys.

So, under this circumstance, I could only rely on the ambient light, which was sometimes good, sometimes bad. End up plenty of my photos were in high ISO and grainy.

Each storey has their theme. Level 5 – Outerspace, Level 4 – Characters, Level 3 Childhood Favourites, Level 2- Collectables and Level 1 is the Mint Shop. They have a cafe and wine bar at the basement and rooftop.

My girlfriend and I at first were just hanging around the museum without the tour guide. I guess most people born after the 80’s also couldn’t figure out most of the toys characters name.

Later according to our tour guide, the “youngest” toy in the museum is the 1976 Star Wars action figure! So, don’t expect to see any latest Japan Anime action figure or Gundam here.

At here, you can see the whole evolution of Mickey Mouse. The first appearance of Mickey Mouse was very different from what we have seen today.

Most of the robot toys were from Japan. After the World War 2, Japan had aware that the future world was all about robots.

One thing I noticed about the vintage toys, they love to make it look chubby. At least, I saw chubby Snow White, Batman, Astroboy……

We reached the place far early than the party starts. After we have walked around the museum, we waited at party hall for the museum tour guide to start. There really have a nice comfortable sofa. Wish to get some of those sofas.

This was also the place where later the party took place; we enjoyed our meal, drinks and music.

With other invited bloggers, this time we had our tour guide walkthrough the place. The tour guide indeed gave an in-depth explanation and storytelling of the history of each toy. We were educated that toys that came with box will increase the value of the toy for 40~60%! Oh my gosh, I must keep all my box, my camera box, my desktop pc box, my PSPS box, my hand phone box……

This was the oldest toy in the museum and it was made in 1840’s. It was built with a simple mechanism where the toy could perform a step-by-step walking down the staircase. During that time, I guess this toy was considered as the most advanced toy.

We saw a Tintin 1:1 ratio toy model in the museum (not the above picture). The fact is Tintin was really quite a short gentleman. I guess his real height only around 1.5m.

The museum’s owner also collected plenty Beatles merchandises. The photo with the signatures of the all four Beatles members was very rare and was one of the precious items in the museum.

Besides the toys, the event organizer had invited 2 illustrators to do some Halloween caricature portraits for the visitors. There were 1 fortune teller and 1 magician in the party.

You don’t expect to get a “normal” portrait from the Halloween graphic artists. They were good at “evil-izing” us with their imaginations. We had our caricature portraits drawn by both artists, Drew and Msxi (hope didn’t get her name wrong).

This really was an unusual Halloween. The museum tour was a little rush; the guide said he could take more than 2 hours to slowly walk through all the toys! I didn’t realize Singapore have such a great toy museum hidden somewhere in the city.

For more interesting and different way to experience museums you can log on to NHB’s social media initiative sites www.SeeDifferent.sg or join www.Facebook.com/SeeDifferent .

Check out my Photo Gallery for more photos.

If any of you have anything you’d like to add, please contribute by commenting below. Thanks!