Honored as a top authentic American experience by Time Magazine, the world’s first action figure museum began in a Pauls Valley basement.
Founder Kevin Stark promised his parents he’d clean up said basement if he could move his toys downstairs from the bedroom he shared with his two brothers.
“As a kid, I was creating my own worlds,” says the artist and toy designer. “And I’ve done that with the museum.”
Today, his creation has grown into
The Toy and Action Figure Museum.
The massive, 25,000-piece pop culture display attracts visitors worldwide to Pauls Valley.
Back in 2000, city leaders dreaming of economic engines landed on the idea of a quirky tourist destination.
“I’m an unofficial tourist attraction,” Stark jokes. “Maybe we ought to make it official.”
The University of Oklahoma alum often opened his private studio to curious folks who’d seen media reports on the toy designer who collected and designed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and many other toy lines in his private Pauls Valley home studio.
“I’ll loan you my toys,” he told city leaders.
A group came together to transform an old 7,000-square-foot department store into the museum. The mind-blowing display of miniatures opened in October 2005, featuring everything from 1959 Barbie to G.I. Joe to Star Wars memorabilia. Don’t miss the chaotic “Collector’s Bedroom” diorama, an action figure collector’s dream.
Among 20,000 yearly visitors have been Japanese tag team wrestlers, a four-year-old boy who proclaimed, “This is the best day of my life!” and grown men who dissolved into tears, Stark says.
“We’re really not about toys,” he adds. “We’re about memories.”
Your quirky road trip continues about 87 miles north at Guthrie’s Oklahoma Frontier Drugstore Museum. The restored pharmacy features a vast array of late 19th and early 20th century pharmaceutical memorabilia. One popular exhibit combines beauty and yuck value.
“The leech jar is always a hit!” says Sandi Colby, museum docent and Oklahoma Pharmacy Heritage Foundation president. Indeed, blood-sucking organisms were so highly regarded during the 19th-century leech mania medicine phase that they were displayed in beautiful ceramic jars proudly labeled “LEECHES.” Don’t miss the asthma cigarettes or the historic hysteria cures, either.
Next up, circle back to the American Banjo Museum in Oklahoma City’s Bricktown district.
It holds the world’s largest publicly displayed banjo collection. The 400-plus instruments and memorabilia include comedian Steve Martin’s 1927 Gibson Florentine banjo used in his The Tonight Show “wild and crazy” stand-up routine.
“I chose comedy over bluegrass,” Martin famously joked, “because nobody ever said, ‘Look at that banjo player in that Porsche!’”
Finally, you’ll find more quirkiness in Catoosa at the D.W. Correll Museum.
Enjoy rare rocks, gems, fossils, a 13-foot dinosaur skeleton, antique cars – and Fluffy, the cat.
When rockhound D.W. Correll bought the 1885 post office building at auction in 1969, he found a naturally mummified cat inside. He put Fluffy on display.
So, now the mummified cat is the unofficial museum mascot – another gotta-see exhibit.
