Tag Archives: Mary Poppins

A Spoonful of Conflict: The Real Story of Walt Disney, P.L. Travers, and the Sherman Brothers from the “Making of Mary Poppins”

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Todd James Pierce’s new book Making Mary Poppins is an essential read for anyone interested in the making of the 1964 classic Mary Poppins or the complex dynamics of creative adaptation. It excels by moving beyond the warm, “feel good” mythologies presented in the film Saving Mr. Banks to deliver a detailed, academic, yet highly engaging account.

The central thesis isn’t the magic of Disney, but the three-way dynamic interplay between Walt Disney’s vision for family entertainment, P.L. Travers’ fiercely protective, esoteric, and ultimately more somber literary vision, and an unlikely pair of brothers who delivered musical magic.

When we watch “Mary Poppins” today, we see seamless magic – Julie Andrews descending from the clouds, Dick Van Dyke dancing across rooftops, and a spoonful of sugar making everything delightful. What we don’t see is the extraordinary twenty-year war of wills that made this masterpiece possible, a conflict between two creative, stubborn individuals with fundamentally opposing visions of what children’s entertainment should be paired with an unlikely duo of musical brothers.

Beyond the Fairy Tale

If you’ve seen Saving Mr. Banks, you know the Hollywood version of this story – a heartwarming tale of Walt Disney melting the icy heart of difficult author P.L. Travers. The reality, as revealed in Pierce’s exhaustive research, is far more complex, fascinating, and revealing about the nature of creative adaptation. This wasn’t a story of one person being right and another being wrong. It was a collision between two legitimate but incompatible artistic philosophies, each championed by a brilliant, stubborn creator who refused to compromise their core values.

The Woman Who Wouldn’t Be Charmed

P.L. Travers was not simply obstinate, as she’s often portrayed. She was a deeply private literary artist who viewed Mary Poppins as something almost sacred – a mystical figure drawn from esoteric traditions, mythology, and her own complex inner world. To Travers, Mary Poppins wasn’t meant to be likable or warm. She was meant to be transformative, enigmatic, and even frightening at times.

For two decades, Walt Disney pursued her, not with simple charm but with persistent negotiations, contract loopholes, and the considerable financial leverage of his studio. Travers resisted because she understood something fundamental: Disney didn’t just want to adapt her books. He wanted to translate them into an entirely different language – the language of American family entertainment, with its emphasis on optimism, sentiment, and emotional transparency.

Her concerns were genuine and literary. She worried that additions like the animated penguin sequence or the nonsense word “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” would strip away the story’s emotional and mystical core, replacing depth with spectacle. She feared her complex character would be flattened into mere cheerfulness. And in many ways, she was right to worry – Disney absolutely intended to transform her creation. The miracle is that the final film somehow honored both visions.

Walt’s Last Great Crusade

For Walt Disney in the early 1960s, Mary Poppins represented something personal and urgent. This was his last major attempt to personally champion a new type of feature film, one that could blend live-action sophistication with the enchantment that had made his animated features legendary. He was deeply involved in every aspect, viewing the project through his famous three-part creative lens: as dreamer, as realist, and as critic.

Disney’s genius manifested in unexpected ways on set. He possessed an unusual ability to tour a finished set, examine the physical props and environments, and spontaneously generate comedic moments and bits of character business. Associates described watching him immerse himself in a scene, feeling every expression and reaction, discovering spontaneous ways the characters might interact with their world. The famous color-changing medicine trick – a multi-chambered prop bottle that elicited genuine surprise from the child actors – exemplified this approach. Disney understood that magic needed to feel immediate and real, not just technically proficient.

His team had to navigate Travers’ constantly shifting demands, often placating her while simultaneously moving the production forward. It was a delicate dance, requiring both respect for her concerns and commitment to Disney’s own vision of what the film needed to be.

The Unsung Heroes: Robert and Richard Sherman

Between these two powerful personalities stood Robert and Richard Sherman, the musical brothers who became the creative buffers this impossible project required. Their background made them uniquely qualified for this nearly impossible task.

As sons of Tin Pan Alley songwriter Al Sherman, they’d grown up immersed in American popular song, learning to write music that was accessible, catchy, and told complete stories in three minutes. Their early success with pop hits like “Tall Paul” gave them an ear for contemporary arrangements that would keep the songs from sounding dated. When Walt hired them in 1960, they became his in-house composers, creating music for theme park attractions and films, absorbing the Disney philosophy of balancing fantasy, family appeal, and narrative clarity.

Mary Poppins demanded unprecedented range from them. They had to satisfy Walt’s desire for spectacle while accommodating Travers’ demand for psychological complexity – and somehow make these opposing requirements work together.

Their musical discipline allowed them to write songs that spoke directly to characters’ inner lives. “The Life I Lead” and “A Man Has Dreams” are almost operatic in their dramatic focus on Mr. Banks’ misery and eventual epiphany – far more complex than typical Disney fare. “Feed the Birds,” Walt’s personal favorite, embodied the gentle yet profound message of charity and neglected beauty that resonated with Travers’ deeper themes.

Simultaneously, their Disney experience enabled them to create grand spectacle numbers like “Jolly Holiday” and “Step in Time,” with complex rhythmic structures and vivid imagery perfectly tailored for animation and cinematic choreography.

Their masterwork of balance might be “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” – pure Disney showmanship and fun, yet cleverly framed by Bert as something to say when you haven’t anything to say, subtly aligning with Travers’ theme of language’s limitations. The Sherman Brothers were equipped with the technical skill of pop writers and the thematic understanding of Disney collaborators, enabling them to create a score that was simultaneously a commercial smash and a deeply textured, narrative-driven masterpiece.

The Transformation of Bert

One of the most significant creative departures from Travers’ original books was the character of Bert. In the novel, he’s a minor figure – a “Match Man” who briefly appears as a chalk artist and has tea with Mary Poppins in one of his drawings before largely disappearing from the narrative.

Disney and the Sherman Brothers recognized that the film’s episodic structure needed a friendly, recurring presence to hold it together. They expanded Bert into a jack-of-all-trades figure, positioning him as Mary Poppins’ confidant and an unofficial narrator guiding the audience and the Banks children through the magic.

Bert cycles through several distinct jobs throughout the film: one-man band and pavement artist (leading to the animated “Jolly Holiday” sequence), chimney sweep (leading to “Step in Time”), and kite seller (providing the means for Mr. Banks’ ultimate redemption). This continuous presence allowed Bert to act as a foil to Mr. Banks – a poor, happy grown-up versus a wealthy, miserable one – providing the structural glue that held the musical’s fantastical segments together.

Dick Van Dyke’s warm, accessible performance made Bert the audience’s entry point into Mary Poppins’ world, a creative decision that Travers initially resisted but which proved essential to the film’s success.

The Messy Reality of Creative Genius

What emerges from Pierce’s detailed historical account is a truth that Hollywood prefers to gloss over: great art often comes from friction, not harmony. The enduring magic of Mary Poppins lies not just in its performances or technical effects, but in the volatile yet ultimately productive tension between opposing creative visions.

Travers never fully made peace with the adaptation. Disney never fully understood why she couldn’t see the magic he was creating. The Sherman Brothers spent years caught between them, somehow finding ways to honor both perspectives. And from this uncomfortable, frustrating, brilliant process came a film that has enchanted audiences for six decades.

The real story behind “Mary Poppins” isn’t about one genius bending another to their will. It’s about the messy, human reality of creative compromise – about what happens when talented, passionate people with fundamentally different values are forced to work together. Sometimes, just sometimes, the result transcends what any single vision could have achieved alone.

That’s the real magic worth remembering.

Making Mary Poppins is a must-have for any serious Disney library. While I have long been fascinated with the original movie, and have multiple books on both P.L. Travers and the Disney movies and stage productions, this book delivers extraordinary behind the scene stories from the key players who made the magic.

This article is the first of four planned for December, three highlighting brand new Disney books just released and one classic about Christmas and Disney:

Part of a regular series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader.

During my elementary school years one of the things I looked forward to the most was the delivery of “My Weekly Reader,” a weekly educational magazine designed for children and containing news-based current events.

It became a regular part of my love for reading, and helped develop my curiosity about the world around us.

Two Mary Poppins: The Book(s) vs. The Movie(s)

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I was six years old in the summer of 1964 when my mother took me to see my first movie in a theater. The lights dimmed, the curtains parted, and there she was – Mary Poppins, floating down from the clouds with her parrot-headed umbrella, about to change the Banks family forever. That experience imprinted itself on my memory: Julie Andrews’s crisp British accent, the animated penguins, the magic of it all. For decades, that was Mary Poppins to me. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered P.L. Travers’s original books and realized I’d only met half the story.

For most people, this is the definitive Mary Poppins – cheerful, warm, and practically perfect in every way. But P.L. Travers, who created the character in 1934, had a very different vision in mind.

Of course, it was necessary to pop back into my Mary Poppins library to refresh my memory in preparation for writing about a newly-released book, Making Mary Poppins (article coming soon).

The Mary Poppins of the Books

P.L. Travers introduced Mary Poppins to the world in her first novel, simply titled Mary Poppins, and continued her story across seven more books spanning over five decades, concluding with Mary Poppins and the House Next Door in 1988. In these pages lives a Mary Poppins who would likely terrify the children who grew up watching the Disney film.

Travers’s Mary Poppins is vain, brusque, and often downright rude. She is obsessed with her appearance, constantly admiring herself in shop windows and mirrors. When the children ask her questions, she frequently responds with a sharp “I never explain anything” or denies that magical events ever happened, even when the children witnessed them firsthand. She is enigmatic and unknowable, maintaining an emotional distance that keeps everyone – including the reader – perpetually off-balance.

This Mary Poppins doesn’t coddle. She expects immediate obedience and has little patience for nonsense. Her severity is palpable; she can silence a room with a glance. Yet despite her stern demeanor, the Banks children adore her with an intensity that borders on desperation. They fear her departure more than anything, knowing instinctively that she appears and disappears according to her own mysterious rules, carried on the East Wind and departing on the West.

The magic in Travers’s books is strange and often unsettling. Mary Poppins takes the children to visit her uncle who floats helplessly near the ceiling when seized by laughter. They meet the Bird Woman, communicate with infants who still remember the language of sunlight and wind, and journey to the edges of the world where mythological figures reside. These adventures feel ancient and mythic, drawing from folklore and fairy tale traditions where magic is powerful, capricious, and not necessarily kind.

Travers, who studied mythology and mysticism throughout her life, imbued her nanny with archetypal power. Mary Poppins is less a caregiver than a liminal figure – a bridge between the mundane world and realms of wonder, part governess and part goddess. She belongs to no one, answers to no one, and her true nature remains forever just out of reach.

The Mary Poppins of Disney

When Walt Disney released his film adaptation in 1964, he created something entirely different – a Mary Poppins designed to charm American audiences and become a beloved family classic. Julie Andrews’ portrayal transformed the character into someone warmer, gentler, and far more accessible.

Disney’s Mary Poppins still has high standards and maintains a certain formality, but she’s fundamentally kind. She smiles readily, shows genuine affection for Jane and Michael Banks, and clearly enjoys their company. When she arrives at 17 Cherry Tree Lane, she brings not just magic but joy. Her adventures – jumping into chalk pavement drawings, having tea parties on the ceiling, and visiting Uncle Albert’s laugh-filled floating sessions – are whimsical and delightful rather than mysterious and slightly dangerous.

This Mary Poppins teaches lessons explicitly rather than through enigmatic experiences. She sings about staying positive (“A Spoonful of Sugar”), seeing potential in everyone (“Sister Suffragette” notwithstanding), and the importance of finding wonder in ordinary life. The film adds the subplot of Mr. Banks’s redemption, making Mary Poppins instrumental in healing the entire family, not just entertaining the children.

Perhaps most significantly, Disney’s version explains her magic and makes her motivations clear. She comes to fix the Banks family, and once her work is complete, she leaves – sad to go, but satisfied. The film gives her emotional transparency that Travers’s character never possesses. Julie Andrews plays her with twinkling eyes and barely suppressed delight in her own cleverness, making the audience feel they’re in on the joke.

The musical score by the Sherman Brothers became inseparable from the character. Songs like “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and “Chim Chim Cher-ee” are now cultural touchstones, their melodies instantly recognizable decades later. This Mary Poppins is Technicolor optimism incarnate, a nanny who makes everything better through a combination of magic, music, and good old-fashioned love.

Disney’s commitment to their version of Mary Poppins has only deepened over time. The 2013 film Saving Mr. Banks dramatized the contentious relationship between Walt Disney and P.L. Travers during the original film’s development, revealing how fiercely Travers fought against Disney’s softening of her character – a battle she ultimately lost but never accepted. More recently, Mary Poppins Returns (2018) brought Emily Blunt to Cherry Tree Lane as an older Mary Poppins returning to help the next generation of Banks children. While Blunt’s portrayal incorporated slightly more of Travers’s tartness than Andrews’s version, the film remained firmly in Disney’s magical, musical tradition, proving that their interpretation has become the definitive one in popular culture.

Why She Endures

So why has Mary Poppins – in both her incarnations – captivated audiences for over ninety years? The answer lies in what both versions share despite their differences.

At her core, Mary Poppins represents something children desperately need and adults nostalgically remember: the presence of someone utterly competent and unflappable who makes life extraordinary. Whether stern or sweet, she possesses absolute confidence and capability. In a chaotic world, she is certain. She knows exactly what to do in every situation, and she does it.

Both versions offer escape into wonder. Whether through Travers’s mythic strangeness or Disney’s musical whimsy, Mary Poppins proves that magic exists alongside the ordinary. She validates children’s intuition that the world contains more than what adults acknowledge—that truth and wonder aren’t opposites but companions.

Additionally, Mary Poppins serves as a bridge between childhood and adulthood. She respects children’s experiences and emotions while maintaining adult authority. She takes their concerns seriously without diminishing her own power. This balance is rare in children’s literature and film, and it resonates deeply.

Finally, there’s the bittersweet element of her departure. Mary Poppins never stays. This temporary quality makes her precious – a golden season that must end, teaching children about impermanence while giving them something beautiful to remember. She proves that endings don’t negate meaning; rather, they concentrate it.

Whether you prefer the mysterious, mythic nanny of the books or the singing, smiling governess of screen and stage, Mary Poppins endures because she embodies a timeless promise: that somewhere, somehow, there exists someone who can make everything better, at least for a while. And in that promise lies a magic more powerful than flying umbrellas or enchanted carpetbags – the magic of hope itself.

In August 2016, during a month-long, daily teaser to my children and grandchildren prior to our week-long Walt Disney World Trip, here was the image and text 17 days prior:

In 1964 Walt Disney combined unforgettable performances, memorable songs, and wonderful special effects into one of Hollywood’s biggest hits, “Mary Poppins.”

Mary Poppins is a proper British nanny who is “practically perfect in every way” and can do almost anything. Flying via umbrella into the Banks household at No. 17 Cherry Tree Lane, Mary Poppins arrives to help put the household back in order. Along the way, we are introduced to a wonderful cast of characters including Bert, Constable Jones, Admiral Boom, the Banks household staff, Uncle Albert, the directors of the Dawes, Tomes, Mousely, Grubbs Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, and a host of animated characters.

Those special effects work on “Mary Poppins” was the most challenging Disney Studios had ever attempted. With live-action characters popping into chalk drawings, amazing musical and choreography, and a heart-tugging story, “Mary Poppins” remains one of Disney’s most beloved family films.

At Walt Disney World Mary Poppins can be found in Town Square at the Magic Kingdom and in England at Epcot.

On a personal note, “Mary Poppins” is GrandBob’s favorite Disney live-action movie, and he has been known to turn the family room into a theater reminiscent of the movie’s premier at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. 

With facsimile tickets. 

Really.