There is a story behind nearly every arcade game, vintage carnival machine and old-time poster in Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum. 


The collection, which covers nearly every square inch of the museum's 5,500 square feet, was started in the 1950s when owner Marvin Yagoda was a pharmacy student at the University of Michigan, preparing to work in his father's drug store in Detroit. 


"I just liked those mechanical things," said Yagoda, 67. "Those old Nickelodeon music machines, I love how they work and how they're made. It's unusual because I'm not very mechanical." 


Yagoda's passion for the bizarre, glitzy and entertaining helped him create his unusual business, sandwiched in a strip mall on the southwest corner of 14 Mile and Orchard Lake roads. 


"This stuff took over the house when I was a kid," said Yagoda's son, Jeremy, 32, who runs the day-to-day operations of the museum while his dad runs the family pharmacy. "Eventually, my mom wanted it out of the house." 


In 1980, when space became available in a food court called Tally Hall, Yagoda's museum opened to the public with a few machines and attractions. In 1988, Tally Hall closed, but Marvin's reopened two years later when the development was reincarnated as today's strip center. 


"We do a lot of birthday parties," said Jeremy. "We've changed the place a little bit over the past two years with more video games. We're now totally for families."


Visitors use quarters to play everything from classic arcade attractions with fortune-tellers and puppets to virtual reality rides that simulate Cedar Point roller coasters. Games and rides aside, one could spend an entire day just taking in the decorative pieces - the posters, the neon signs, the statues and the just plain peculiar items. 


"This we got from one of the Ripley's Believe It or Not museums when it closed down," said Jeremy, gesturing to an 8-foot-11-inch statue of Robert Wadlow, the world's tallest man, who died in 1940 at the age of 22. 


Not far away is the Cardiff Giant, a huge, dark-colored statue that was washed with sulphuric acid and pounded with darning needles by P.T. Barnum himself to make it look like a weathered remnant of a lost race. 


"P.T. Barnum made millions from touring this statue, even though everyone knew it was a fake," said Jeremy. 


A replica of an electric chair is mounted high on one wall, proclaiming to be the same model that electrocuted 30 inmates at Sing Sing Prison in New York. 


When asked where he finds all his treasures, Yagoda says, "I can't disclose all my sources, but you find ads in magazines and after a while, people start coming to you." 


Yagoda said he occasionally rotates the pieces in the museum, and some of them are listed for sale on his Web site, www.marvin3m.com. He doesn't have a count of how many pieces he owns and he says they're all his favorites. 


"They're like your children, and you can't pick a favorite child," he says. 


Matthew Blaquiere, 18, of Clarkston, was visiting Marvin's during a break between classes at Oakland Community College's Orchard Ridge Campus. He found out about the place online and said since May, he's been stopping in two or three times a week. 


"I like the variety of games and the atmosphere - it's a home-like setting," said Blaquiere. 


Jeremy says while he shares his dad's passion for the bizarre to a degree, he sees the place more from a business standpoint. 


"But I wouldn't be sitting here if I didn't enjoy it," said Jeremy. "My dad can't leave anything normal, he has to add his own little touches, like Humpty Dumpty sitting on the snack bar. He's 67, but he will never grow up."