Toykino! Toy Museum, Seoul South Korea

While walking home from a nice trek along the old Seoul gate wall (another post on that subject later) I came across the Toykino toy museum.  At first I didn’t realize that it was an actual toy museum, the billboard/sign had a superhero on the front of it and a small spray painted stencil of a punk girl with a bazooka (a nice touch if I do say so myself.).

I thought maybe it was a sign for some type of coffee shop as the neighborhood where it’s located is full of coffee shops with different themes.

I had just finished a long 3-4 hour trek along mountainous terrain and I wasn’t in a mood to stop and check it out.  I made a point to remember it’s location and told myself I would visit it a later time.

Today was that day!  This post contains a lot of pictures and could take a very long time to load if you have a slow connection!  We had our first cloud and rain filled day but in between showers I ventured out towards toykino.   Here’s the low down on Toykino taken from the official site of Korea Tourism, link here:

• Address:
  Seoul-si Jongno-gu Samcheong-dong 63-19
• Inquiries
  – Korea Travel Phone +82-2-1330 (Korean, English, Japanese, Chinese)
  – For more info +82-2-725-2690 (Korean)
• Operating Hours
  13:00 – 19:30
• Closed Every Monday
• Website in Korean only here:

The tourism page says that it has 30 000 toys but I’ve read on other websites the number is as high as 70 000.  Either way the collection has a very large amount of toys so let’s get the pictures rolling!  The entry fee was 5,000 won (about 5$ Canadian).

Here we have the shop sign and stairs leading up to the entrance:

The shop itself has several small rooms (5 or so if memory serves me well) dedicated to various characters so let’s just jump right on in!  Let’s begin with the life size characters, in one of these you can see my backpack which helps give you a sense of perspective:

Onto some of the Simpson sets:

I only snapped a few of the army toy sets but he had a larger collection than what i’m including here:

Moving onto one of the larger collections: star wars.  I enjoyed the original three star wars films and that probably says more about my ‘geekness’ that i’d care to admit.  That being said the collection was huge and I thought it was impressive.  I’ll begin with one funny photo, let’s play a game of “which one doesn’t belong”.  If you don’t recognize which one is out of place then you should return your geek badge at the door!

Now that you’ve passed the test onto the serious star wars goodies!  Here we had an autographed limited edition AT AT walker (only 250 of them made).

Some star wars ships:

Finaly to finish off the star wars set a mish mash of minatures, boxed and unboxed characters, helmets and a life size darth vader:

I’m going to bunch the next set of pictures together because placing them each in their own category would take too much time and to be honest there are a few I didn’t recognize.  I wouldn’t want to anger the toy fanatics out there by mislabeling some of them.  Here we have some Hollywood movie toys, some bugs bunny (warner brothers) and Hanna-Barbara amongst other sets:

A few last sets that hold a special place in my heart or are mentioned for other reasons.  First the muppets, growing up me and my brother used to love watching this show:

Unfortunately I don’t think the photo does justice to this Jaws promotional box.  It looked more like a cut out shark, the water, swimming girl and other aspects all were in 3d.  It’s hard for me to explain how this was setup because I don’t know the correct terminology for this type of product but if you look real closely at the picture I think you’ll understand what I’m trying to explain (Look at the shadows cast by the different objects):

A special section for Mickey mouse (Walt Disney) and some girl characters (princesses etc) from his various movies.   Most of these types of toys are associated with geeky nerds and special effect movies or cartoons.  I thought it was a refreshing twist to see some items geared towards the ladies.  Check out the last picture of the Mickey Mouse antique. I have no idea what this was used for.  When I got a chance to speak to my Korean friend she indicated it was something to do with the “rock,  paper, scissors” game.  Perhaps some little machine that you competed against for “coupons” which you could redeem??

Another set which deserves it’s own gallery is lord of the rings.  After the star wars and various cartoon characters this was probably the second largest amount of toys at the museum on “one subject”:

I couldn’t get myself to bundle these into the “generic” section mish mash above.  I present to you, Napoleon Dynamite.  I thought these were great.  I apologize ahead of time for the slightly fuzzy pictures, not sure why I had problems capturing these!

Finally as you got ready to exit the museum you were greeted by these nice little “paintings” above/beside the door: