The film Mary Poppins was released on this date in 1964. 10 things you might not know about Mary Poppins:
The film happened because Walt Disney’s daughters were big fans of the Mary Poppins books. Walt promised them in the 1940s that he would make a movie of the books. However, it turned out to be a promise that took a long time to keep as author PL Travers refused to sell Disney the rights. She finally did in 1961 but only because she was desperate for the money. When she saw the film, she hated just about everything about it and vowed never to work with Disney again.
Elizabeth Taylor, Angela Lansbury and Bette Davis were all considered for the role of Mary. Julie Andrews didn’t jump at the opportunity at first, because she was holding out for the role of Eliza in My Fair Lady. When that went to Audrey Hepburn, she signed up for Mary Poppins.
The movie is set in London, but not a single scene was shot there. It was shot, in its entirety, at Disney’s Burbank soundstage in Hollywood. Over one hundred glass and matte paintings were used to re-create the London skyline of 1910.
The song A Spoonful of Sugar was inspired by the polio vaccine. The children of one of the Sherman Brothers, who wrote the songs, happened to have had the vaccine while the songs were being written. Asked if the vaccine hurt, one of the kids replied that it hadn’t hurt at all; the medicine was simply placed on a sugar cube and they ate it like candy.
The word Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious wasn’t made up for the film. It, or a very similar word, had been around since at least the 1930s when the Sherman brothers heard it at a summer camp. There was even a song called “Supercalafajaistickespeealadojus” which was written in 1949 by Barney Young and Gloria Parker. Needless to say, they tried to sue Disney for copying the word. Since Disney’s lawyers were able to prove the word had been around for decades, they lost. So what, if anything, does Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious mean? Nobody knows, although there’s an urban myth suggesting it’s something to do with Irish or Scottish prostitutes.
Feed the Birds was Walt Disney’s favourite song ever. He would frequently drop by the Sherman brothers’ office and ask them to sing it to him.
The Sherman brothers actually wrote about 30 songs for Mary Poppins, but 20 of them never made the cut. Some got recycled in later films. The Beautiful Briny was later used in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and the melody from Land of Sand was eventually recycled as Trust in Me from Jungle Book.
Several of the stars performed more than one role. Both Julie Andrews and David Tomlinson provided voices for animated characters. Julie Andrews was excellent at whistling as well, and so she whistled the song of the animatronic Robin. Look at the end credits and you’ll see that the banker Mr Dawes Sr. was played by an actor called ‘Navckid Keyd’. Which is an anagram of Dick van Dyke, who played him as well as Bert.
While the cherry trees on Cherry Tree Lane were real, the blossom was fake. To create the effect of blossom-laden branches, artists hand mounted thousands of twigs and paper blooms.
The snow globe used in the Feed the Birds scene was thrown in the bin, but was fished out by a janitor who thought it a shame to throw such a pretty object away. The janitor kept it in his office for years until it was found there by Dave Smith, who founded the Walt Disney Archive in 1970.
The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.
The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.
Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.
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