How Disney Appropriated Mary Poppins

Illus. Mary Shepard, "Mary Poppins"

Illus. Mary Shepard, “Mary Poppins”

Last week I watched Saving Mr. Banks, the Disney movie about how Walt Disney overrode the resistance of  author P. L. Travers to make Mary Poppins. While I found Saving Mr. Banks rather light fare, I learned one interesting thing: author P. L Travers had the same objections to Disney’s movie version of the book that I did.

I avidly read Mary Poppins, Mary Poppins Comes Back, Mary Poppins Opens the Door, and Mary Poppins in the Park when I was a child. While I loved the adventures, I was most drawn to Poppins’ contradictory personality: while she seems emotionally cold, she always comes through for the children, sometimes taking them on amazing adventures, sometimes saving them from danger. When she serves the children their bedtime medicine in their first encounter, she never cracks a smile:

A spoon was attached to the neck of the bottle, and into this Mary Poppins poured a dark crimson fluid.

“Is that your medicine?” enquired Michael, looking very interested.

“No, yours,” said Mary Poppins, holding out the spoon to him. Michael stared. He wrinkled up his nose. He began to protest.

“I don’t want it. I don’t need it. I won’t!”

But Mary Poppins’ eyes were fixed upon him, and Michael suddenly discovered that you could not look at Mary Poppins and disobey her. There was something strange and extraordinary about her—something that was frightening and at the same time most exciting. The spoon came nearer. He held his breath, shut his eyes and gulped. A delicious taste ran round his mouth. He turned his tongue in it. He swallowed, and a happy smile ran round his face.

“Strawberry ice,” he said ecstatically. “More, more, more!”

But Mary Poppins, her face as stern as before, was pouring out a dose for Jane. It ran into the spoon, silvery, greeny, yellowy. Jane tasted it.

Upon hearing at 13 that Julie Andrews would be playing Mary Poppins in Disney’s film, I knew that it was all wrong. The real Poppins isn’t the sweet Sound of Music Maria, nor would she ever crow about her “spoonful of sugar” strategy. I lived for the moments in the books where one catches a glimpse of Mary’s soft or her unorthodox side, but those moments are precious only because they are unexpected. If we were to see them all the time, there would be no magic.

I think I was drawn to the figure because people weren’t as expressive in the 1950s as they are today. My father would later learn to hug but I don’t remember many hugs at the time. Therefore Mary Poppins was my assurance that, behind emotional distance, we were cared for.

Saving Mr. Banks soft pedals Disney the way that Disney soft pedaled Mary Poppins, painting him  as a benign patriarch. That a Disney movie would whitewash the founder of the company is no surprise. But there is one revealing moment. Seeking to understand why Travers is working so hard to control her creation, Disney remembers how protective he was of Mickey Mouse.

Though the film shows him to be momentarily sensitive, however, it then downplays the fact that he does indeed wrest Poppins away from Travers and remake her in his own image. The 1964 Mary Poppins is all Disney, with the threat of emotional barrenness unacknowledged. That threat is central to to Travers’ drama. She had every reason to be furious.

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