Being given a replica of Mary Poppins with the aid of PL Travers for my eighth birthday turned into a thrill and, because it turned out, one of the best disappointments of my younger existence. A thrill due to the fact for the last five years, I had lived and breathed the Disney version, which had popped out in a blaze of glory in 1964. At faculty, I received the unofficial prize for the person who had seen the movie the most times (I stated 8, even though it honestly became the most effective six: but within the Disney universe, believing something difficult enough is important to making it come proper).
I did, though, really win the competition for who may want to say  “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious†backward. And, at home, I sternly supplied my grandmother with the sheet track of the Sherman Brothers’ score. Like a bad fairy princess bullying her court docket musician, I made Grandma play on, and on till the moment, it appeared that we might each spin ourselves right into a cloud of colored chalk dust of the type that Bert the pavement artist makes use of the cartoon his magical opportunity worlds. However, when I unwrapped my present, I knew something had gone wrong. My dad and mom had shape when it came to missing the factor.
Through the years, I had been the recipient of endless cover versions of branded toys – knock-off variations of Barbie, Caran d’pain, and Ladybird –, and this Mary Poppins seemed especially counterfeit too. For a start, the duvet turned into a muddy, slightly sinister pink. This, I now assume, was a nod to  “Strike Me crimsonâ€, considered one of Mary Poppins’s favored sayings, or perhaps to the blossom in Cherry Tree Lane.
Anyway, red turned into now, not then, the absolute obsession with little girls that it has on account that emerge as, and I have been hoping for the luscious, bleeding shades of Disney’s Technicolor. However, the image of Mary Poppins on the duvet changed a ways worse. Drawn by Mary Shepard, daughter of EH Shepard, who illustrated Winnie-the-Pooh, Mary Poppins is regarded as not like the gentle and adorable Julie Andrews. In reality, she resembled a stiff peg doll, thin and hard, with a peg nose and two spots of excessive color on her timber cheeks. This turned into the form of a nanny, magical or not, from which any sensible toddler could decrease.
I understand now that this tough-cornered Mary Poppins turned into no longer a few careless slips on Shepard’s part – the e-book preceded the movie 30 years, and, as far as Travers was concerned, it turned into Walt Disney, who got it incorrect. At the same time, he added spoonfuls of sugar, no longer to mention a few larky caricature penguins, to her as an alternative darkish text. It’s far from Travers’s and Disney’s fraught tussles over whose Mary Poppins might finally triumph that is introduced to existence in Saving Mr Banks, the new movie starring Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks.
As Travers’s textual content makes it clean, Mary Poppins is no splendor. She has squinty eyes and large feet and regularly attracts comments from the opposite characters that she is  “no longer a great deal to examine. Nor does the unique Mary Poppins sound what, ver just like the carefully modulated Julie Andrews. Travers gives her the accent and vocabulary of a real London nanny: cockney base notes overlaid with a strangled gentility. So she says such things as  “I’ll have you ever realize that my uncle is a sober, sincere, difficult-working guy!†and punctuates her pronouncements with  “an advanced sniffâ€.
As I further studied the book, I became suspicious and palmed off with inferior items. There has been no Bert here, no longer in reality. He makes a brief loowatchmanatchman and pavement. However, there’s no trace of the only-guy amusing manufacturing f. Thisty, this is Dick Van Dyke. Mary Poppins doesn’t arrive from the sky, at least no longer in the first e-book (there are six in general), and, most discombobulating of all, there aren’t Banks kids but 4: Jane, Michael, and toddler twins John and Barbara. Mrs Banks did not lark around making a song about suffragettes, and Mr Banks was never given to fly a kite.
But I ought to have forgiven all these dreadful derelictions – how livid Mr . Disney should be! – if the e-book wasn’t so oddly stupid. Or possibly that must be dully atypical. There were lengthy, waffly passages in which characters who didn’t appear in the Disney movie went on and on about the celebs, the wind, the moon, and the Grand Chain connecting all creatures. Even the adventures that Mary Poppins undertakes tender fees had an indeterminate satisfaction without a right resolution. On top of each outing, Jane and Michael visit the Mattress, but they are now unsure what has just happened or what it all approached. And the identical changed into proper of eight-yr-antique me. Disgusted, or possibly disturbed, I tucked Mary Poppins directly into the  “too difficult section of my small library and moved on to Paddington Undergo. Rooted in the secular geography of Peru, Portobello Avenue, and marmalade sandwiches, you knew where you were with Paddington.
A huge part of Travers’s quarrel with Disney changed into something she did not create, especially for kids, and that became all he did. One of the first-rate scenes in Saving Mr. Banks shows Travers, performed busin, overwhelmed with horror to discover that her los angLos Angeles have been filled with soft, cuddly toys from the Disney organization’s celluloid bestiary, including Winnie-the-Pooh. Alternatively, Travers saw herself as a mythographer. A follower of Gurdjieff, the Russian mystic who delivered the wWestto a ragbag of eEasternmysticism within the first aart of the 20th century, Travers became extra inquisitive about excavating the archetypes that underpinned esoteric Christianity than dreaming up nursery pap.
She constantly made the factor that it became the grownups, now not the kids, who needed Mary Poppins maximum. One of the most critical scenes in the book worries the child twins John and Barbara Banks, who can speak tof speaking light and the wind and animals and swear that they’ll by no means overlook this joyful international of oceanic oneness. However, on their first birthday, they may be thrown out of paradise, just as Mary Poppins continually stated they could be and can no longer speak with the herbal world. It was to assist all the grownup Johns and Barbaras fito in returning to this region of innocence and style that Mary Poppins first got here to earth.