Toys R Us is BAAAAACK!

ITS BACK! Calm down. Toys R Us came back last fall, and opened two stores in America. One was in Texas somewhere, and the other one... in New Jersey! It's in the Garden State Plaza Mall in Paramus. Which is a little over an hour drive for us. Finally got a good weekend to go check it out and got some pictures to share!

You may still see these logos on abandoned buildings around America, but this one is all lit up! It might be a little awkward to see this in a mall, and not on a giant building outside, but I'm going to take what I can get!

Early December and there's a line to get in! How posh. There's an odd mix of excitement, confusion, and eye-rolling "seriously?" murmurs in the line. We drove a long way to get here, so a line like this isn't going to scare us away.

The window displays in front had dolls of various kinds. Cute.

What is going on with these dolls? It says Rainbow Surprise and then really tiny "by Poopsie" They come packaged with slime? And if you look closely, her soda cup shaped purse doesn't say "Fanta" it says "Farta". Well, It certainly makes the line waiting a little more entertaining, at least.

We're IN! It was about a fifteen minute wait. Not very long, but if you've stood in line for 15 minutes you can agree it probably felt like it was a lot longer.

Right away you notice this tree house in the middle of the store. Are we in a McDonald's? Do they sell tree houses here? They've never had tree houses in any Toys R Us stores before that we can remember.

This was the only "exclusive" merchandise we found here, the Geoffrey Giraffe mascot plushie. There was plenty of them, and it was hard to remember if we saw these on clearance when the stores were going out of business a few years ago.

There was a roped-off area in the back which is for parties or something. Who wants to check out a schedule of events like they say?

They have the magical mirror thing here where you stand in front of a giant screen and the character matches your movements. My friend jumped in and gave it a wave and a stomp.

We laughed at this Nerf Gun firing range area. It totally reminded us of the type of thing you'd see at the New York Toy Fair. But since most people don't have access to that, this is what it's like!

The Lego section was small and lacking any kind of special or exclusive sets. Giant Emmet was still happy about it all. 

There was a Nintendo section, who wants to pick up a gross germ-filled Switch to play around with? Oh, not NOW you say? Relax, you got some of that hand sanitizer stuff with you, right?

Mario did not get full points for landing in this position on the flag pole. I wonder if this is the Mario that was in the Nintendo World store in New York? It's been a while since we've been there.

Haha there was a pipe in the corner for you to get a silly video from. Act like you are jumping out of it, or going down. Of course you'd need to edit in the sound effect.

There were large screens around displaying the prices options. Is this the future of bar code scanning? I'm in a store but it kind of feels like shopping online.

We got a laugh out of this Monster Truck named "Crushstation" That's clever.

For the most part, the toys in this store were basically readily available everywhere else. But there was a section of Schleich toys that we've only seen at the Toy Fair, which was cool.

 There's a giant wall of Melissa & Doug toys, too. It was hard to take pictures like this because the store was so crowded and you really can't tell people to move out of the way. These photos are giving the wrong idea about the crowd and it seems like it was not very busy.

 OOOOhhhhh! Who wants to stay until 3 o'clock and meet Baby Shark? Do do do do dodo Baby Shark!

 Giant wooden cut-out Geoffrey leaning on the wall. This may have seemed a little underwhelming, but we are glad to see you back and smiling. The store really isn't very big but it's still packed with some fun stuff.

 Everybody was taking selfies with the giant giraffe, it was a little too busy to pose Minty over there without probably-annoying tons of people. Hey, I'm running a blog over here! Barely got a clear picture before another kid jumped over there.

 While the actual TOY selection was bland, we did purchase a Geoffrey Giraffe to mark the return of the store in America. Thanks, Toys R Us!