![]() ![]() To an astonishing extent, the way they came to think and talk about their employees was shaped by the movie they had seen so many years earlier. But they would become adults in an America that had invented a new nanny culture. These were children who grew up in an America in which nannies were as unfamiliar to middle-class neighborhoods as Jaguars and Martians. The movie also left a deep impression on the generations of children who saw it during its three theatrical releases, in 1964, 1973, and 1980. ![]() It was a persona-spinsterish children’s author, creator of a spinsterish character-that overshadowed the more complicated identity she had devoted her life to creating. She spent the rest of her long life (she died in 1996, at the age of ninety-six) linked artistically and personally to Mary Poppins. Travers’s dreams of becoming a famous writer were realized because of Disney’s movie, but its scope eclipsed everything else that she had or would achieve. Writing to a friend, she remarked that her life would never be the same. But she had a premonition that the movie she hated was about to change everything for her. She would turn the personally disastrous première into a hilarious dining-out story, with Disney as the butt of her jokes. The picture, she thought, had done a strange kind of violence to her work. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books, could have been forgiven for assuming that her tears were the product either of artistic delight or of financial ecstasy (she owned five per cent of the gross the movie made her rich). In the midst of the celebrating crowd, it would have been easy to overlook the sixty-five-year-old woman sitting there, weeping. Inside the packed twelve-hundred-seat theatre, the members of the audience responded to the movie with enthusiasm: they gave it a five-minute standing ovation. He had carefully engineered his entrance: when his car pulled up, the Disney characters mobbed it, and soon afterward clouds of balloons were released into the air. Disney was by then immensely famous, appearing on his own television show every Sunday night. Then Walt Disney himself arrived, stepping out of a stretch limousine and gallantly reaching a hand into the car to help his wife, Lillian, onto the pavement. The arrival of the movie’s principals aroused muted excitement: Julie Andrews, who played Mary Poppins, had never appeared in a movie before, and Dick Van Dyke-the chimney sweep Bert-became much better known after the film’s release. Hollywood luminaries arrived in chauffeured automobiles, the women in ball gowns and mink stoles (Angie Dickinson, Maureen O’Hara, Suzanne Pleshette), the men wearing dinner jackets (Edward G. Throngs of screaming fans were greeted by Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Snow White and the dwarfs, as well as by entertainers who gestured toward the movie’s Edwardian setting: a twelve-piece pearly band, chimney-sweep dancers, valets dressed as bobbies, and a bevy of pretty Disneyland hostesses, whose traditional uniforms (kilts and black velvet riding helmets) suggested a general Englishness. Sanders’s droll line readings alone would have put this film on my list.The 1964 world première of “Mary Poppins” was held at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, and it was the kind of spectacle for which the Disney organization had become famous. As the villainous tiger Shere Khan, Disney cast the star of the greatest movie ever made (“All About Eve”), George Sanders. I rewatched it during the pandemic, and it held up.Ĭontains my pick for the best Disney song (“The Bare Necessities”) and the great voice talent of Sterling “Winnie-the-Pooh” Holloway, Phil Harris, and Sebastian Cabot. I found endless amusement in the exploits of Merlin, Archimedes the Owl, and Wart - I mean Arthur - the kid who would be king. This was my second favorite Disney cartoon as a kid (keep reading for what’s still my first). But then, neither of these choices is remotely faithful to the legend forced upon me in high school. Other than this film and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” I hate everything that has to do with King Arthur. Guess which movie terrified me more? Bonus points for naming a dwarf after my general disposition: Grumpy. It was also supposed to be the first movie I ever saw, but on that same day, my cousin took me to “The Exorcist” beforehand. This one earned the nostalgia vote, as it was my first Disney movie. A scene from "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937).
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