A Board Game for a Royal Premiere
The Walt Disney Presents Sleeping Beauty Game was issued by Parker Brothers around 1958-1959 as a tie-in to Walt Disney’s animated feature. It belongs to the wave of film-and-park licensed toys that Disney and its merchandising partners rolled out in the late 1950s, translating the studio’s newest release into a product families could buy and play at home. In keeping with the source material, the game cast each player as the Prince, who races along winding, perilous paths toward the sleeping princess, the goal being to reach her and break the enchantment with a kiss. Its components carried the storybook theme through to the table: molded pawns, a spinner to govern movement, and small sword and shield cards drawn from the film’s confrontation between the hero and the forces arrayed against him.
The Film It Celebrated
Sleeping Beauty premiered on January 29, 1959, and stands among the most ambitious animated features Disney ever attempted. It was the first animated film presented in the large-format Super Technirama 70 widescreen process, paired in equipped theaters with six-track stereophonic sound. The picture’s distinctive look came from production designer Eyvind Earle, whose flat, angular, tapestry-like compositions drew on pre-Renaissance and medieval European art and gave the film a deliberately handcrafted, illuminated-manuscript quality. The score, written by George Bruns, was adapted from Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s 1889 Sleeping Beauty ballet. On screen the story followed Princess Aurora, raised in hiding as Briar Rose by the three good fairies, the villainous Maleficent, and Prince Phillip, all of whom appear on the game’s box art.
The feature carried an enormous price tag for its day and was, by the standards Disney itself had set, a costly undertaking that did not recover its budget on first release. Critics of the time admired its art direction and music while finding fault elsewhere, and the film’s wider reputation as a landmark of animation grew over the years that followed. For collectors of fairy-tale Disneyana, it sits alongside the studio’s other princess pictures such as the Cinderella game and the Snow White game with its special Magic Mirror.
The Castle Connection
No Disney property is bound up with a Disneyland landmark quite as tightly as Sleeping Beauty. When the park opened on July 17, 1955, its central icon was already named Sleeping Beauty Castle in anticipation of the film still in production. On April 29, 1957, nearly two years before the picture reached theaters, guests could begin walking through the castle’s upper level to view a series of dioramas telling the story, staged in the same Eyvind Earle style that would define the film. The walk-through let visitors experience the tale at the heart of Fantasyland before the feature itself arrived, the same land served by Parker Brothers’ earlier Walt Disney’s Fantasyland Game and its 1956 follow-up, both of which pictured the castle on their boards. The board game thus closed a loop that ran from the park icon of 1955, through the 1957 walk-through, to the 1959 premiere, with each piece reinforcing the others. Readers can trace the castle’s long afterlife in souvenirs through seventy years of Sleeping Beauty Castle keepsakes, and follow the film’s animation art through the silver-age cels of the 1950s through 1970s.
