The Cavalcade and Nerd Lunch assault the Tallahassee Auto Museum Part II
A few weeks ago, I visited Carlin Trammel (of Nerd Lunch) in Tallahassee for an historic meeting of bloggy awesomeness. Together we witnessed the random awesomeness that is the Tallahasse Auto Museum, inhaled Double Downs at a local KFC and talked about all things nerdy (Star Trek, Star Wars, super hero movies, blogging, etc). Yes, a nerd connection was made.
Anyway, on Monday I discussed all the awesome cars Carlin and I peeped in the museum. On Tuesday, Carlin posted his recollections of our trip to the museum. I’m continuing the week long look at my sojourn over to the ‘hassee by revealing to you all the other randomly epic crap that was crammed into the “auto” museum that had nothing whatsoever to do with cars. You will be amazed.
Let’s start with…
Pianos. Yes, this place had a collection of about 10 pianos. This particular one looks like a Fisher Price toy made for a giant baby. I swear my 10 month old son has a piano very similar to this (only “normal” baby size).
Here Carlin is checking out the re-DONK-ulous gold piano that would be the perfect centerpiece to any room. And it is flanked by two tasteful life size gold lions. In my mind this is the piano that God is playing when you enter the Gates of Heaven. And he’s playing the theme to the movie Chariots of Fire. Or The Sting.
From pianos we move to…
Dolls. This place also had an entire section of collectible dolls. Amongst the Barbies and Skippers there were a few choice, geeky items. Here is a nearly full set of Mego’s 1976 Wizard of Oz figures. They are only missing a few Munchkins figures and the Witches Castle and Munchkinland playsets. I am in love with this set. It was this set that put Mego on the map and allowed them to get the Marvel and DC licenses to create their World’s Greatest Super Heroes line.
Here’s a random grouping of dolls. On the left is a nice boxed Kenner Star Wars Princess Leia doll. I don’t know why it was unceremoniously stuffed behind a set of Donny & Marie dolls. WTF Tallahassee Auto Museum?! On the right is a Mattel Starr doll which was a teenaged version of Barbie that came out around 1980.
Next up…cereal boxes.
Lots of Wheaties boxes in this museum. Here are two Wheaties variations I hadn’t seen in years. Honey Frosted Wheaties and Crispy Wheaties n Raisins. They both came out around 1996. I’m not entirely sure if they are still around. I haven’t seen them. There was even a cool Wheaties box with a fold out Michael Jordan basketball hoop on the back. See it here.
Here are some Corn Pops boxes from 1995 promoting Batman Forever. I love cereal boxes promoting movies, and these are awesomely colorful.
More randomness…
Here’s a weird custom Batwing. It looks like someone just kitbashed a remote control plane into an odd little Batwing. This was just hanging from the ceiling in the Auto Museum without any rhyme or reason. Or explanation.
A Baby Calculator. Makes it easy to calculate the number of babies you have. Or maybe it’s for babies to do their math homework. Or maybe Baby is the company name. I don’t know.
A sealed box of Skybox USA Dream Team cards circa 1992. I was a huge NBA fan in the 80s – 90s so I was obsessed with the first Dream Team. I had Bird’s USA #7 jersey, the full set of McDonalds collector cups, posters, t-shirts, VHS videos and a bunch of these cards. Someday I’ll have to do an article on the ’92 Dream Team merchandise. It was plentiful.
And finally…
Die-cast trucks with awesome vintage logos on the trailers. I have no idea when these trucks were produced but the logos are vintage 80s-90s. Burger King, Pepsi, Doritos and Texaco logos.
Well, that’s about enough for today. There was a whole lot more that I haven’t even told you about. You can see a lot more pictures from this trip to the Tallahassee Auto Museum in my Flickr set here.
Tomorrow Carlin will share even more photos from our trip and I’ll be back on Friday to talk about our lunch at KFC and my “Showdown with the Double Down”. Oh, and the Mega Pepsi. Stay tuned.
Cavalcade of Awesome 
July 20, 2011 at 8:41 am
The gold piano is exactly the kind of thing that I would buy if I were massively rich, something traumatic happened to the rest of my family and I went crazy.
The organizational part of my brain wanted to go through and overhaul how things were laid out in that museum. That doll section was one of the biggest offenders. It was in a large, roped off room and you couldn’t get anywhere near any of them to look at them. So my picture of the Dolly Parton doll didn’t really turn out that good.
Surprised you didn’t call out the boat motors section. I had to drag you away from those, Paxton.
July 20, 2011 at 8:52 am
Yeah, I was pretty close to having a “boat motors” section in this article but I lost interest in the middle of writing it. I have more pics of the boat motors than I have of the cereal box/gun section. What the hell was I doing? I don’t really even like boats.
July 20, 2011 at 9:25 pm
I must own one of those Batman Corn pops box!
July 21, 2011 at 9:16 am
This has to be the most random museum in the history of museums. Probably funded by our tax dollars, too.
July 21, 2011 at 10:58 am
Actually, I’m pretty sure this museum does not get any public funding. It’s a private collection all owned by one guy who seems very conservative in his political beliefs. It would probably be a contradiction for him to accept public funding.
July 26, 2011 at 10:30 am
Looks like they have a nice collection there. I like the gold piano.