Tets goes to the Yokohama Doll Museum (to see Transformers!)

The Yokohama Doll Museum happens to have a Transformers exhibition on at the moment (25 May until 30 June 2019).  Since I hadn’t heard about this place before and a brief look at their website has images linking to a cafe with promising coffee options, I decided to go and have a look.

Promising coffee, and an entry sign.

The museum is located opposite Yamashita Park and the closest train station is Minato Mirai line’s Motomachi-Chukagai station.  The weather was good and I was looking for some adventure so off I went.  Once I found the place (It’s pretty easy) I was presented with some cool looking banners in the entryway.



Upon getting to the ticket section, I noticed there weren’t that many people there and the staff were shooting the breeze with the family before me.  A good sign that there weren’t many people here.  Upon buying my ticket, the staff informed me I could also have a gander at the whole museum (yay, it was 900 yen after all) and that photo taking was ok, but no flash.  Thanks lady!  She also spoke some English in case you are worried.

Moving on, there first few floors were their standard displays and full of various dolls of various eras.  Kind of interesting for me as a history guy, and a little bit creepy as I often find old dolls to be.  Japanese traditional ones especially.  Or maybe that is because of too many horror movies….

I must admit that some of the dolls were really well made!

When one has made one’s way up to the upper level, one can see the entryway to the Transformer exhibition.  Inside was a good start, they had a Changing Autobot/Decepticon logo on the floor like the cartoon and a couple of display cases with some Beast Wars, G1 and movie toys in them.

Just behind the banner with Scavenger, Prowl and Primal is a large Optimus statue and kind of next to that is a large Optimus bust.  Behind the bust, you can see an area where they had some cartoons playing, providing atmosphere.

Along the walls were display cases with various themes to them and breaking the room in half were the dioramas using movie toys that were used at toys shows and pretty much all the other Transformer exhibitions.  I don’t mind as they fill space and look cool.  There was a new one too with scenes from the Bumblebee movie, it looked really well done too!

Now onto the cabinets.

From car to robot.

I got a load of crappy blurry pictures today for some reason, but luckily nothing new and exciting in any of these.  This theme was car mode Transformers.  My first sight of Siege Prowl and dang, is he a tiny boy!  I do love his vehicle mode though!  But tiny tiny tiny.  They had a good emphasis on the transformation aspect with each cabinet having at least one character “shift” between modes.

From plane to robot.

I was particularly impressed with Siege Jetfire.  THAT, ladies and gents is one nice looking toy!  This also had my first look at Masterpiece Thrust.   Although the theme is planes, they mention rockets in the blurb up top as well as flying through the sky….  I guess Seaspray just snuck in to that one.

1:1 Life size toys.

Hnng, what’s there to say except for all that great cassette and microchange action.

Multi Changers and  Bases

I’ll give credit to whomever set this cabinet up.  Must have been hard to set those big bots up in a cool way in that limited space.

Gestalts

This was a nice one to look at.  Lots of unite warriors (and a cursed Sky Lynx).  I still want a Sky Lynx… Blast his being a box set guy!!

Animals and Dinosaurs

(not Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, a missed opportunity here guys)

Collaboration toys (nothing new here)

I do like the white of that 711 truck though, veeery nice.

Live action movie toys

Meh.


The whole section looked pretty nice and they had a couple of statues standing about.

That’s it for the main sections and displays.  In the area with the cartoon showing they had a little Cyberverse corner and a wall of Masterpieces.

Man I thought the cyberverse toys look awful.  I did like this Optimus Truck mode though.  Shame about everything else.

The back area looked like this:

Man I like that poster!

I was hoping for some Masterpiece Black Arachnia action for my little eyeballs, but no such luck.  Nor was there a version of Prime #3 or Bumblebee #2.

Man, that MP Cheetor has some great lightpiping, I forgot how big Starscream’s jet mode is!

I took these ones because of mild amusement.  Like that Ironhide nappy…. Convoy #1 still looks pretty nice there and with the Grimlock, I think the robot mode is a Hasbro one as the shoulder plastic look a tad milky Hasbro-grey while the dino has a more solid looking metallic look to it.  These pics did make me realise that I still want that Masterpeice shockwave.

And that my friends is pretty much all she wrote.  I finished the day by looking at the gift shop, which had some books and some expensive wall hanger things from the previous 35th Anniversary place I went to at Parco. So I guess, a nice day out, but not quite as exciting as the exhibition at Parco.  Considering how this one was more toy focusses, whereas Parco was art focussed, Parco had a better selection of toys to look at.

So I wandered off to the cafe with the promising coffee and got talked into having their special blend….

820 (!!!!!!!!) yen later, I had a fantastically great cup of coffee (I’d expect so for that price!) and went home.  Oh, the staff at the cafe were really nice too.   They have no-so-expensive coffee if your
interested.


P.S.  Sorry, I forgot to take a picture of the pants I prepared for this trip…  If it’s any consolation, they were just normal boring old pants. Well, not old as such, but standard not exciting pants.  You know what I mean, sheesh, leave my pants alone!