Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum

For my money, the best thing about Marvin's is that it's a damn fine arcade, in addition to having a fantastic collection of oddities. You wanna see original Houdini banners and play DDR? There's only one place to go.

... a warning, though: it's pretty intense in there. You may not want to go there after dropping acid or taking two and a half hits of ecstasy instead of the one hit you had planned on taking because your friend assured you that it was "pretty weak" and you may want to "crank it up a little"

... not that I would know that. I'm guessing.

I loved this place when I was a kid. I remember a machine where you would stick your hand in and a mechanical dog would bite at you.

Marvin's is an amazing place!! I love going there, and Marvin is a very nice person! I once saw him at the Ann Arbor art show looking for new, unique things to put into his museum. To call this place just an arcade is an understatement.

Vertol: last I looked, the dog machine is still there!

I didn't realize that this was a real place! One of my favorite recent music albums is "Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum" by a group called Tally Hall. I thought it was just something they made up.

It's real! Too cool.

This was a staple when I was growing up. It was just a short run down the street from the high school. It is truly intense in there. I never thought of it as a museum though. It always seemed like a romanticized vision of an old arcade.

Nice post Luci! Granted, I'm biased because she's my sister and I was there too. The hand in the mechanical dog-bitey cage is indeed still there (we got my girlfriend to try it in the hopes of making her jump out of her skin, ;) though we merely got some amusing squirming out of her), but it's only a fair example of all the other bizarre things there. The "Museum" part of the title is no lie: there are some genuinely antique boardwalk type of attractions that are pushing 100 years old, sometimes right next to a brand-new arcade game or pinball machine. I think my favorite part is the player piano/calliope/automaton instrument hybrid thingamajig. You wouldn't think he could cram all that crazy stuff into that one big room.

Ah, I remember the old nickelodeons - those were pretty cool machines. I'll have to stop by next time I pass through Detroit.

Since you're in Northeast Ohio, have you ever seen Cedar Point's Museum? Not nearly as many things in it as Marvin's, but there some fascinating pieces in there (a mechanical violin and INTENSE cuckoo clock, both sadly not working). You can still play some turn-of-the-century arcade games, though.

"Nickelodeons" THANK YOU, I could NOT remember what those things are called. Cedar Point's museum sounds like an incentive for me to get back up there. I haven't been since before they built the Millennium Force, which is pretty sad since I'm only a couple hours away (from where I sit at work I could probably walk to Pennsylvania in under a half hour). Somebody needs to do a post on antique-style amusement parks that are still in operation, like Kennywood in Pittsburgh. Props to Cedar Point though, it does have some of that feel about it still.