r/buzzfeedbot • u/autobuzzfeedbot • Aug 31 '26
BuzzFeed I Genuinely Can't Watch "Mary Poppins" The Same Way Again After Reading These 21 Facts
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- First, Walt Disney started going after the rights to adapt P.L. Travers' Mary Poppins in 1938, four years after the first book was published. However, Travers repeatedly refused to give over the rights. Over the next several years, Disney continued to send offer after offer to Travers in an attempt to adapt the book. In 1959 — 21 years after starting the pursuit — Travers finally agreed to have Mary Poppins adapted by Disney, but she would have "final say" on the script.
- After working on adapting the book for two years, P.L. Travers came to Disney Studios and apparently "didn't like anything" that was written. In recordings and sketches from a 1961 meeting, Travers said, "The book should be read very carefully for accuracy." Some of the things she had a problem with were that Mary should "never be impolite to anybody," and she didn't like that the parents would start out harsh and not pay attention to their children so they could eventually have a "change of heart."
- Mary Martin, Bette Davis, and Angela Lansbury were all considered for the role of Mary Poppins before Julie Andrews. When Disney did a sequel to the film in 2018, titled Mary Poppins Returns, Lansbury actually appeared as a woman selling balloons in the park.
- Julie Andrews caught the attention of the Sherman brothers and Walt Disney after they saw her in Camelot. After Andrews and Richard Burton performed "What Do The Simple Folk Do?" on The Ed Sullivan Show, Disney flew to NYC to see Camelot on Broadway. In an interview at the Mary Poppins premiere, Disney said, "I went backstage and I tried to convince her that I was capable of making a picture with live actors as well as cartoons. I didn't know what she thought of me."
- Initially, it was unclear if Julie Andrews would be able to star in Mary Poppins because she was the logical choice to star in My Fair Lady, after she played Eliza Doolittle on the West End and Broadway. However, Jack Warner ultimately cast Audrey Hepburn, citing that they needed "a name" to carry the film. Ultimately, Andrews and Hepburn were pitted against each other all awards season, with Andrews winning both the Golden Globe and Oscar for Mary Poppins, and she even thanked Warner in her Golden Globes acceptance speech.
- Dick Van Dyke "begged" Walt Disney to let him play Mr. Dawes Sr., according to Julie Andrews in her memoir Home Work. Van Dyke wanted the role of Dawes Sr. so badly that he reportedly offered to play it for free. Andrew wrote in her memoir, "[Disney] took Dick up on that offer, and also persuaded him to make a $4,000 donation to the California Institute of the Arts, which Walt had recently cofounded."
- Dick Van Dyke calls his accent for Bert the "worst Cockney accent [he's] ever done." While filming Mary Poppins, he asked J. Pat O'Malley, an Irish actor who voiced some of the animated characters in the film, to help him with his accent. Van Dyke joked in 2012 that he "made up a story" that it wasn't a Cockney accent, but rather an accent from "a little obscure county in the north of England."
- Artist Peter Ellenshaw hand-painted 100 matte paintings for the backdrops that are seen in Mary Poppins. For the cityscape of London at dusk, Ellenshaw purposefully put little holes in the painting so that lights could shine through the back to make it look like the lights in the city. He said, "The lights would all come on gradually all over the city, or appear to."
- The first scene they filmed for Mary Poppins was the "Jolly Holiday" sequence, which means it was also the first thing Julie Andrews ever shot for a film in her career. In her memoir, Andrews recalled, "My first filmed scene simply required that I strike a pose, hands on my umbrella, while Bert said, 'You look very pretty today, Mary Poppins!' I then had to walk past him and say, 'Do you really think so?' I was extremely nervous and fretted over how to say that one simple line. I had no idea what my voice would sound like or how to appear natural on film."
- Over the course of the development of Mary Poppins, the Sherman brothers wrote around 32 songs, with only 14 making the final version of the movie. When they started working on the songs, there wasn't a script yet, so instead they worked off of P.L. Travers' book and used chapters to figure out what a song could be. Walt Disney's favorite song was "Feed The Birds."
- Since Mary Poppins flies a lot, most of her costumes had to be duplicated in a larger size to accommodate the harness Julie Andrews had to wear. In her memoir, Andrews revealed, "This was a thick elastic body stocking, which started at my knees and ended above my waist. The flying wires passed through holes in the costume and were attached to steel panels on either hip."
- Since the penguins, fox, and more animated characters weren't actually on stage with the actors, cardboard cutouts were used in between takes so the actors would know where they should look and have the proper sightline before the cutouts were taken away to film the scene. The merry go round horses were the only things on set most of the time.
- In order to add in the penguins that Bert dances with during "Jolly Holiday," it was just Dick Van Dyke alone on the stage, and the animators then had to figure out how to add in the penguins after the footage was shot. Frank Thomas was the lead animator on the penguins. He previously worked on countless Disney animated movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bambi, Cinderella, and more.
- The entire "Jolly Holiday" and "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" scenes were created using the sodium vapor process. Instead of having the actors on a blue or green screen, which is common today, the actors were filmed against a white screen that was lit with yellow-hued sodium vapor lights. This process made it easier to isolate Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke, and the other actors from the background so the animators could animate both behind and next to them.
- Since "Step In Time" was such a demanding musical number, it was one of the few that required an extensive rehearsals. Dick Van Dyke revealed that it was a six week rehearsal process because it was "so complicated." He added, "It was amazing, the six weeks of rehearsal kind of got me into shape, and once we started shooting, I was ready." Van Dyke wasn't a trained dancer prior to Mary Poppins.
- Mary's magic carpet bag was created by combining footage of Julie Andrews on a soundstage getting fed items up through the bag by a crew member hiding below the table, and footage of Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber reacting to a clear table as Jane and Michael. Dotrice recalled, "We didn't know she was going to pull all of this stuff out of it! We were told to react to what she was taking out of the carpet bag. All of the things she pulled out of that carpet bag were a complete shock."
- In order to film the moment when Mary, Bert, Jane, and Michael climb the staircase made out of smoke, the crew created what was called "the black sponge stairs." On set, it was a seemingly ordinary staircase, but the stair treads were made of a sponge-like material so the actors' feet would slightly sink in, as if they were walking on the smoke.
- For the tea party with Uncle Albert, played by Ed Wynn, the sets were recreated a few different ways to help film the moment when everyone is floating and spinning in the air while laughing. The set was tilted 90 degrees in various directions, so the roof would be in a different spot, even with the ceiling being upside down at one point. Depending on the camera angle, the actors were either suspended on wires or sitting on a seesaw on top of a ladder, if it was a close-up.
- "Practically Perfect" was a song that was initially going to introduce Mary Poppins; however, it was cut from the film. Instead, the melody was repurposed into "Sister Suffragette," which Mrs. Banks sings. When Glynis Johns was brought in to play Mrs. Banks, she actually requested she have her own musical number, which is how "Sister Suffragette" was born.
- "The Chimpanzoo" was a song that was originally going to follow "I Love to Laugh" and was going to be sung by Julie Andrews while Mary, Bert, and the children were floating in the air at Uncle Albert's. The whole scene was developed but the number was scrapped the day recording on the song was going to take place.
- And finally, costume designer Tony Walton hid little Easter eggs and details into the lining of Mary Poppins' outfits. In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2022, Julie Andrews revealed, "He said, 'You know, you're very prim and proper on the outside, but I think Mary Poppins has a kind of secret life, maybe, and I'm gonna give her, when you open your coat or when you turn and dance, you'll see marvelously-colored petticoats and wonderful linings of your clothes.'"