Saving Mr. Disney

The Weekly Standard ^ | 1-20-14 | John Podhoretz

[afraidfortherepublic]

The year is 1961.

A wonderful and kind and nice and glorious man named Walt Disney must convince a mean and nasty and crazy woman named P.L. Travers to allow him and his movie studio to do something really nice for his children and your children and everyone’s children. Our hero—call him Walt, everybody does, except P.L. Travers, because she’s mean and nasty and insists on “Mr. Disney”—wants to make a movie out of Travers’s book Mary Poppins, because he promised his kids he would, and a man never backs out on his promise to his kids. P.L. Travers is crazy because she doesn’t want him to do it and tries to sabotage the project by insisting he shouldn’t do it the way he knows it should be done. Unfortunately for all that is wonderful and nice and good, the crazy mean woman owns the rights because she happens to be the creator of Mary Poppins.

This is the plot of Saving Mr. Banks, starring Tom Hanks as Walt Disney and Emma Thompson as P.L. Travers. It is a strange plot, because we know that Disney will prevail and the classic movie we’re seeing in chrysalis will, in three years’ time, become a beautiful butterfly starring Julie Andrews—the 25th-most-successful movie ever made. The sketches we see on the wall in the Disney studio office of the songwriting Sherman brothers look exactly like the Edwardian London that would soon appear in Mary Poppins (1964). We watch the Sherman brothers conceive “A Spoonful of Sugar.” We hear one of them play the melody to “Chim Chim Cher-ee.” We are meant to swoon when they and the screenwriter dance with Travers to “Let’s Go Fly a Kite.” Mary Poppins the movie is all there, including the notion of casting Dick Van Dyke as...

[RichInOC]

Re Dick Van Dyke, his TV show started in ‘61, which is also where the storyline of “Saving Mr. Banks” starts, but he debuted on Broadway in ‘59, and started doing “Bye Bye Birdie” the next year, and had had a career in TV and radio before that.