A Board Game You Played Through a Viewer
Klomp-It is one of the odder entries in 1970s Disney play: a board game published by GAF that built its gameplay around the company’s own View-Master stereo viewers. Rather than reading clues off cards alone, players looked into View-Master viewers loaded with reels of three-dimensional photographs. Those photographs were not illustrations or animation frames but actual shots of costumed Disney characters photographed at Disneyland and Walt Disney World. The set paired the viewers and reels with a printed board and 1970s graphics featuring a roster of classic Walt Disney characters, turning the act of looking into a stereo viewer into the engine of the game itself.
View-Master and GAF
The View-Master system was far older than the game. It debuted at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the invention of William Gruber and the Sawyer’s company of Portland, Oregon, which turned the format’s seven-image stereo reels into a fixture of mid-century American living rooms. Originally marketed in part as a scenic-tourism novelty, View-Master became deeply associated with travel, national parks, and eventually entertainment licensing. In 1966 the General Aniline & Film Corporation, known by its initials GAF, acquired Sawyer’s and folded View-Master into its consumer products line. Through the late 1960s and 1970s, View-Master reels carried the GAF name, and the company leaned heavily on television, movie, and theme-park subjects to sell them.
Disney was central to that strategy. GAF produced View-Master reels covering Disney films and, importantly for collectors of park history, reels shot on location at Disneyland and the newly opened Walt Disney World, where Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom had welcomed guests beginning in 1971. Klomp-It drew on exactly that vein of material: in-park photography of characters who could be met walking the parks. That era of costumed-character photography is a recognizable part of Disney’s visual record, and the View-Master reels preserved it in stereo, giving home audiences a dimensional view of figures like Mickey, Donald, and Pinocchio as they appeared in the parks.
The Novelty of a Viewer-and-Board Hybrid
What makes Klomp-It notable in Disney game history is the hybrid concept. Board games of the period normally relied on a printed board, dice, and cards. By routing play through View-Master hardware, GAF was using the game as a vehicle for its core product, the stereo viewer, while the Disney license supplied the imagery. It sits alongside other 1970s park-themed games that leaned on the appeal of the recently expanded Disney resorts, such as a board game touring the new Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom and the Walt Disney World Haunted Mansion game. The decade also produced licensed park-touring games further afield, including a Japanese-edition Disneyland touring game, evidence of how widely the parks were being translated into tabletop play.
For students of the parks, Klomp-It is less interesting as a game to win than as an artifact of how Disney imagery moved between media. The same characters guests photographed in front of the castle were professionally photographed in stereo, pressed onto GAF reels, and then handed back to families as a thing to play. It connects to broader threads in Disney’s merchandising story, from the rise of Walt Disney World souvenirs across its first decades to the documentation of Disney goods that fed the growing Disneyana hobby taking shape in the same mid-1970s years. Viewed that way, a viewer-and-board game becomes a small window onto a moment when the parks, a 1939 optical toy, and a chemical-and-film conglomerate briefly shared a box.
