Mary Poppins

I, like many of my generation grew up watching "Mary Poppins." Although it was released in 1964, by the time I was a young one, Mary Poppins was readily available on VHS, so I would see it every year or so. Imagine my surprise to learn just this year that the movie was based on the children's novel Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers. I have to admit I was "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" about reading it.

I am going to consider this novel a life lesson. Leave your childhood memories alone. The Mary Poppins I grew up with was like a magical "Fairy Godmother" who came into the lives of two lonely children who needed love and attention. My Mary Poppins made every day an adventure and I used to wish my parents could afford a nanny.

It turns out that Walt Disney, or more specifically screenwriters Bill Walsh and Don Dagradi, and composers Richard and Robert Sherman, worked their "Disney magic" on a frankly dark piece of fiction.

P. L. Travers' Mary Poppins was a vain, ill tempered woman who the children and the entire household was scared of. Chapter 10 begins;

"All day long Mary Poppins had been in a hurry and when she was in a hurry she was always cross. Everything Jane did was bad, everything Michael did was worse. She even snapped at the twins. Jane and Michael kept out of her was as much as possible for they knew that there were times when it was better not to be seen or heard by Mary Poppins."

That is not an attitude of a child to their fairy godmother. If Mary Poppins was a fairy, she was most certainly a dark one!

And frankly the magic Mary Poppins wielded in this novel is dark at best and quite possibly terrifying to a small child. In one chapter Mary Poppins takes the children while she shops. At the end of the trip she takes the kids to a dodgy shop to buy gingerbread. The shop owner breaks off two of her fingers and gives it to the twins to suck on. It does not matter that she says they just grow back over night. That is just creepy. In another chapter Jane and Michael wonder what the creatures at the zoo do at night. Well of course they end up at the zoo that night and animals are outside waiting to see the people in the cages being fed! It made me a little uncomfortable and I'm not a small child.

I guess I will say Reader Beware; before you read P. L. Travers Mary Poppins, just know you will be reading a very "undisney" movie!