Mary Poppins

So when my sister and I were younger, we'd watch Mary Poppins like it was the only movie on earth.  My mother reminds us of the headaches we gave her when it's brought up.  I've had three copies of the movie; the first was dubbed, I think, when my sister and I were very young.  Then, the movie was accidentally "lost" after it annoyed my mom too many times (wonder how that happened).  We got a legit VHS copy a few years later, and I still loved it.  My parents own the copy and although I didn't have to watch it like five times a day when I was younger, I still saw it often enough to be able to quote almost the entire movie by heart (all except for those few patches that you don't really understand when you're a kid so you make them up in your head and that's what you remember them to be).

So, I got older, moved out, and life went on without Mary Poppins.  Sad, I know.  My grandma apparently thought it scandalous that a girl who loved Mary Poppins so much as a kid didn't have a copy of her own, so exactly two years ago at Thanksgiving, she bought me the anniversary edition.

I've had the movie sitting around for two years and have been meaning to watch it with Kyle, but we haven't gotten to it.  Sometimes I was in the mood for a different sort of movie, and then when I would bring it up, he would say something like, "Oh, you know how I feel about musicals," or "I watched that movie when I was a kid and thought it was stupid."  Finally I convinced him on Saturday to watch it with me. 

So even though he DID make fun of it a little bit throughout, he overall enjoyed the movie, I think.  I caught more humor now than I did when I was a kid (mostly because we had the subtitles on and I could tell what the characters were really saying as opposed to making up what they were saying in my head) and Kyle's had the "Feed the Birds" song stuck in his head for the past few days.  We talked throughout the movie about how the film played up some common themes in Edwardian and Victorian literature, which is actually quite surprising because P. L. Travers (the author of the Mary Poppins book) didn't set the story in 1910...that was a Disney creation. 

So I suppose Walt Disney borrowed a lot of ideas from Charles Dickens for the movie.  One of these in particular that we saw was that Mrs. Banks was based on a character called Mrs. Pocket from his book Great Expectations.  Of course, Mrs. Pocket was not a suffragette, but she was a mother who was absent for a cause, much like Mrs. Banks is in the movie.  Other similarities to Great Expectations is the Banks' neighbor Admiral Boom who runs his house like a ship...Dickens created a character called the Aged Parent who sets off a cannon at his castle-like home in the morning and evening.  Also similar to Dickens, P. L. Travers named the family after the father's job.  Therefore, Mr. Banks works at a Bank.  In Dickens, Mr. Baker would be a baker, etc.

Kyle was also in amazement at the quality of the special effects of the movie.  We paused quite often so he could explain how they managed to film the characters while in a cartoon, how Mary was able to draw huge items out of her carpetbag, etc.

So all in all, I think we both rather enjoyed watching the movie together.  And something else happened...this time I cried at the end!  Perhaps it has something to do with feeling sorry for children who are neglected by absent parents (which is something I didn't understand when younger) but now "Let's Go Fly a Kite" is my absolute favorite song of the movie.

If you haven't seen Mary Poppins....rent it!