Review of The Making of Mary Poppins by Todd James Pierce – The Musical Brothers Behind the Movie Magic | Cinema books

toLike many kids of the VHS generation, I must have watched my recorded copy of Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964) more than 100 times. I probably knew every frame, as did Walt Disney himself, who invested 20 years in bringing it to the screen.

His crowning achievement in live-action, Mary Poppins remains the project Walt was most proud of. The cutting-edge, multi-Oscar-winning musical proved that the House of Mouse was more than just a caricature, its box office success enabled it to expand its Florida ambitions for the Disney World Resort and bolster the company’s financial future.

But what is its secret formula? Here, Disney historian and podcaster Todd James Pierce methodically reveals the mechanics behind the magic. His accessible and somewhat scholarly book invites us to view the beloved film not through its star, Julie Andrews (who made her nervous screen debut, aged 29, and won an Oscar), but through its unsung heroes. In fact, it’s an autobiography surreptitiously written by Bob and Dick Sherman, the songwriting duo who redefined the Disney sound with hits including “It’s a Small World (After All), one of the most performed songs of all time.”

The Shermans, the immigrant children of a Kiev-born musician, were working as songwriters in Los Angeles when their work caught the ears of Walt Disney. For reasons not fully explored by Pearce, Walt soon commissioned “the boys” (as he called them), who had never developed a screenplay before, to complete the long-awaited Poppins project. Working directly from B. L. Travers’ book (i.e. without script or treatment), the Shermans composed the tunes, then stitched them together to construct an entirely new and cinematically satisfying story from what was originally a book of interconnected short stories about a charming English governess.

“Do you know what a nanny is?” Disney asked the brothers. “Yes, a goat,” Bob Sherman replied. No wonder there was such a cultural gap with the formidable Travers, who was terrified of turning her spiky creativity over to Disney. In her book, Mary Poppins is a much less attractive character, and instead of singing lullabies about feeding birds, she suggests baking them into pies. Resistant to Disney’s charm and many of his team’s suggestions (“She didn’t like anything we wrote… it tore us apart,” Bob said), Travers had a list of demands that needed to be met before she would relinquish the rights to Poppins. These ranged from making the actors all British (which didn’t work with Dick Van Dyke – disappointingly, his notorious Cockney accent is barely mentioned here), to having Walt “promise me there’ll be no red in the movie”.

Her bizarre conflict with Disney was brilliantly and poignantly realized in Saving Mr. Banks (2013). Starring Emma Thompson as Travers and Tom Hanks as Disney, it makes the perfect, most emotional companion piece to Pearce’s faithfully researched account.

However, where Pearce lacks curiosity, wonder, or desire to tell a high-stakes story — which is odd for a man so immersed in all things Disney — he is strong in the collaborative nitty-gritty of such a major adaptation. Many of the “making-of” details will be familiar to Poppins fans, such as the origins of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious — based on a nonsense word the Sherman brothers heard as children at summer camp in the 1930s — and how Sister Suffragette’s song was quickly put together to please actor Glynis Johns, who mistakenly thought she would play Mary Poppins. (The role was assigned to Bette Davis, with Cary Grant running for Burt.) The lesser-known “lost” serials included a flying sofa and a round-the-world trip to a magical zoo (which, like many discarded items, eventually found their way into Bedknobs and Broomsticks); and using sodium vapor “yellow screen” to create the groundbreaking live action/animated crossover. Some pictures would have been great, but this book has none of them.

With no new interviews to rely on either — which is understandable given the age of any of the surviving cast and crew (Dick Van Dyke will turn 100 next December) — Pierce diligently searches the Disney archives for his illuminating and comprehensive take.

However, one major question remains unanswered. How did Mary Poppins pour spoonfuls of multi-colored medicine from the same bottle?! I guess it was magic after all.