The Game
The Disneyland Monorail Game is a roll-and-move race game published by Parker Brothers in 1960. Built for two to four players, it casts each player as the pilot of a monorail and sends them around a board themed to Disneyland’s Tomorrowland and its surrounding attractions. The twist is that players are not only racing one another but also racing a non-player rival who moves on a separate track. That rival is Casey Jr., the Circus Train from Dumbo. It is a small but telling detail of the design: although the box cover features the Santa Fe & Disneyland Railroad steaming through the artwork, the on-board train the players actually compete against is Casey Jr. A single throw of the dice advances both a player’s monorail and Casey along his own course, and because Casey can reach the finish first, the train itself can win the game.
The cover is a panoramic mid-century illustration that doubles as a tour of the park as it stood at the turn of the decade. The red Mark I Monorail runs as the hero image across the front, with the Matterhorn, the Submarine Voyage lagoon, the TWA Rocket to the Moon, Sleeping Beauty Castle, and the Santa Fe & Disneyland Railroad arranged around it.
The Real History Behind the Box
The game arrived hot on the heels of one of the most consequential days in Disneyland’s history. The Disneyland-ALWEG Monorail opened on June 14, 1959, the first daily-operating monorail in the Western Hemisphere. It did not debut alone. June 14, 1959, is remembered as Disneyland’s “second opening,” a major Tomorrowland expansion that brought the Monorail, the space-age Matterhorn Bobsleds, and the Submarine Voyage on stream the same day. The streamlined Mark I trains that the game celebrates were designed in-house by a Disney team under Bob Gurr, whose work gave the system its distinctive sleek nose and elevated beamway.
The other landmarks on the box reach back to the park’s first summer. Disneyland itself opened July 17, 1955, and Tomorrowland’s Rocket to the Moon attraction, marked by the towering TWA Moonliner, followed days later on July 22, 1955. By 1960 those 1955 fixtures and the brand-new 1959 attractions sat side by side, and Parker Brothers’ artwork captured exactly that overlap, a park whose oldest Tomorrowland icons and its newest “highway in the sky” shared the same skyline. Sleeping Beauty Castle and the Santa Fe & Disneyland Railroad round out the scene as the park’s signature gateway landmarks.
Parker Brothers and the Disneyland Games
The Monorail game was one entry in a run of Disneyland-themed titles that Parker Brothers produced as the park became a merchandising engine. The company built games around the park’s individual lands and signature attractions, including the Disneyland Riverboat Game, the Tomorrowland Rocket to the Moon Game, the Adventureland Game, the Frontierland Game, and a Fantasyland Game. The Casey Jr. rival in the Monorail game even connects it to Parker Brothers’ separate Casey Jr. Game. Together these titles turned a child’s roll of the dice into a trip through the park, letting families relive the Monorail, the Matterhorn, and the rest of Tomorrowland on the living-room floor.
