Step back into the early days of Disneyland with the 1956 Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland Rocket to the Moon Game by Parker Brothers. The box and board carry mid-century Googie-style artwork built around the iconic TWA Moonliner and the optimistic futurism of original Tomorrowland — a true tie-in to the attraction that helped define the park’s first year.
One of the Disneyland “lands” games
In 1956, just one year after Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California, Parker Brothers of Salem, Massachusetts produced a series of board games based on the park’s themed sections for Walt Disney Productions. The set drew on Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland, and Tomorrowland, translating each land’s look and theme into a tabletop game. The Tomorrowland entry, Rocket to the Moon, cast each player as the owner of a rocket racing to reach the launching platform and then fire toward the Moon — the kind of Space-Age fantasy that defined the era. An example of this Tomorrowland edition is preserved in the collections of The Henry Ford as an artifact of the early Disneyland years.
The game sits alongside its siblings in the series, including Walt Disney’s Adventureland Game, Walt Disney’s Official Frontierland Game, and Walt Disney’s Fantasyland Game, as well as the later Disneyland Monorail Game that carried Tomorrowland’s forward-looking spirit into the next decade.
The real Rocket to the Moon
Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955, and Tomorrowland was conceived as an optimistic interpretation of how science and technology would improve everyday life. Rocket to the Moon opened in Tomorrowland in the park’s first days, sending guests on a simulated round-trip lunar voyage. Towering over the land stood the TWA Moonliner, a needle-nosed spaceliner designed by Disney artist John Hench with input from rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. At 76 feet tall, the Moonliner was the tallest structure in the park — standing higher than Sleeping Beauty Castle — and it became the visual signpost of Tomorrowland.
The Moonliner was sponsored by Trans World Airlines, whose name and red striping it wore from 1955 to 1961. Its sleek silhouette captured the moment’s faith that commercial spaceflight was just over the horizon — the same forward-looking confidence that ran through Disney’s televised space programming, including Man and the Moon. That optimism is exactly what the board game packaged for the home: the rocket, the launch platform, and the promise of the Moon.
Parker Brothers and Disney
Parker Brothers had been a Disney licensee since the 1930s, and by the mid-1950s the partnership turned naturally toward the brand-new theme park. Disneyland was a cultural event, and a set of games keyed to its lands let families bring a piece of Anaheim into the living room. The Tomorrowland game, with its Moonliner art and race-to-the-Moon play, stands today as a snapshot of how thoroughly Disneyland captured the public imagination in its earliest seasons — a story echoed in the park’s original attraction posters of the same period.
