Where to watch Mary Poppins (1964)

Trivia & production notes

• Walt Disney spent over 20 years trying to convince author P.L. Travers to sell the film rights, even traveling to her home in London, before finally acquiring them in 1961.
• P.L. Travers demanded and obtained script-approval rights as a condition of selling the film rights, but Disney's contract included final cut privilege, which he used to override her objections to elements like the original songs and animation sequences.
• Julie Andrews was cast as Mary Poppins shortly after being passed over by Jack L. Warner for the role of Eliza Doolittle in his adaptation of My Fair Lady, despite having originated the part on Broadway.
• Disney postponed filming to accommodate Julie Andrews, who was three months pregnant when he approached her about the role.
• Dick Van Dyke lobbied to play both Bert and the senior Mr. Dawes, and Disney agreed to a screen test that won him over for the dual role.
• Dick Van Dyke's Cockney accent in the film ranked as the second-worst film accent in a 2003 Empire magazine poll, and Van Dyke later publicly apologized for it at a 2017 BAFTA awards ceremony.
• The Sherman Brothers, who composed the music, suggested changing the film's setting from the 1930s to the Edwardian era during the film's development.
• P.L. Travers hated the animated sequences so much that she refused to allow any further adaptations of the later Mary Poppins novels.
• The penguin dance scene used the sodium vapor process, an alternative to bluescreen that involved filming actors against a white screen lit with special yellow-hued lights and using a prism to create a highly accurate matte.
• Mary Poppins won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 1965, largely due to the innovative sodium vapor process used in the penguin sequence.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Mary Poppins (film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.