Like many kids of the VHS generation, I must have watched my taped-off-the-telly copy of Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964) well over 100 times. I probably knew every frame as well as Walt Disney himself, who invested 20 years in bringing it to the screen.
The culmination of his live action achievements, Mary Poppins remained the project Walt was most proud of. A sophisticated, multi-Oscar-winning musical that proved the House of Mouse was about more than just cartoons, its box office success enabled him to expand his Florida ambitions for Disney World resort and shore up the company’s financial future.
But what was its secret formula? Here, Disney historian and podcaster Todd James Pierce methodically reveals the mechanics behind the magic. His accessible and slightly scholarly tome invites us to view the beloved movie, not through its star, Julie Andrews (then nervously making her Oscar-winning screen debut, aged 29), but through its unsung heroes. Really, it is a biography by stealth of 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 immigrant sons of a Kyiv-born musician, the Shermans were jobbing LA songwriters when their work caught the ears of Walt Disney. For reasons Pierce never fully probes, Walt soon tasks “the boys” (as he called them), who had never developed a screenplay before, with realising his long-cherished Poppins project. Working directly from PL Travers’s book (ie, with no script or treatment) the Shermans composed tunes, then strung them together to construct an entirely new, cinematically satisfying narrative out of what was originally a book of interconnected short stories about a magical English nanny.
“Do you know what a nanny is?” Disney asked the brothers. “Yeah, a goat,” Bob Sherman replied. No wonder there was such a culture gap with the formidable Travers, who was horrified at the Disneyfication of her spiky creation. In her book, Mary Poppins is a far less attractive figure who, rather than sing lullabies about feeding the birds, suggests baking them into pies. Resistant to Disney’s charms and many of his team’s suggestions (“She didn’t like anything we wrote … she chopped us apart,” said Bob), Travers had a list of demands that needed to be met before she would relinquish the Poppins movie rights. They ranged from dictating that all the cast were British (she didn’t get her way with Dick Van Dyke – disappointingly, his notorious cockney accent barely gets a mention here), to making Walt “promise me there will be no colour red in the motion picture”.
Her eccentric clash with the Disney is brilliantly and movingly realised in Saving Mr Banks (2013). Starring Emma Thompson as Travers and Tom Hanks as Disney, it makes the ideal, more emotive companion piece to Pierce’s dutifully researched account.
However, where Pierce is rather lacking in curiosity, wonder or the desire to tell a high-stakes story – odd for a man so immersed in all things Disney – he is strong on the collaborative nitty-gritty of such a major adaptation. Many “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 kids at summer camp in the 1930s – and how the Sister Suffragette song was quickly cobbled together to appease actor Glynis Johns, who mistakenly thought she was being cast as Mary Poppins. (The role had been earmarked for Bette Davies, with Cary Grant in the running for Bert.) Less well-known are the “lost” sequences that featured a flying sofa and a round-the-world trip to a magical zoo (which, like several discarded elements, eventually found its way into Bedknobs and Broomsticks); and the use of sodium vapour “yellow-screen” to create the groundbreaking live action/animated crossover. A few photos would’ve been nice – this book has none.
With no new interviews to draw on, either – understandable given the age of any surviving cast and crew (Dick Van Dyke turns 100 this December) – Pierce diligently trawls the Disney archives for his illuminating and comprehensive cuts job.
One major question, however, remains unanswered. How did Mary Poppins pour spoonfuls of multicoloured medicine from the same bottle?! Guess it was magic after all.
• Making Mary Poppins by Todd James Pierce is published by WW Norton (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
