We study the monodromy of a certain class of semistable hyperelliptic curves over the rationals that was introduced by Shigefumi Mori forty years ago (before his Minimal Model Program). Using ideas of Chris Hall, we prove that the corresponding $\ell$-adic monodromy groups are (almost) ``as large as possible". We also discuss an explicit construction of two-dimensional families of hyperelliptic curves over an arbitrary global field with big monodromy.