‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface (The NYT Op-Ed finds it racist)

The New York Times ^ | 1/28/2019 | Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

[Beave Meister]

“Mary Poppins Returns,” which picked up four Oscar nominations last week, is an enjoyably derivative film that seeks to inspire our nostalgia for the innocent fantasies of childhood, as well as the jolly holidays that the first “Mary Poppins” film conjured for many adult viewers.

Part of the new film’s nostalgia, however, is bound up in a blackface performance tradition that persists throughout the Mary Poppins canon, from P. L. Travers’s books to Disney’s 1964 adaptation, with disturbing echoes in the studio’s newest take on the material, “Mary Poppins Returns.”

One of the more indelible images from the 1964 film is of Mary Poppins blacking up. When the magical nanny (played by Julie Andrews) accompanies her young charges, Michael and Jane Banks, up their chimney, her face gets covered in soot, but instead of wiping it off, she gamely powders her nose and cheeks even blacker. Then she leads the children on a dancing exploration of London rooftops with Dick Van Dyke’s sooty chimney sweep, Bert.

[a fool in paradise]

>>Does the New York Times use that shameful black ink?
>>Filthy, stinking racists.

When you read really cheap newsprint, the ink rubs of on your hands as you read it and gets all over everything, hands, face, clothes.

#Truth

[otness_e]

Honestly, you think THIS is stupid, wait till you see how the NYT reacted last new year’s with a Japanese comedy sketch that was meant to reference Beverly Hill Cop with Eddie Murphey (who last I checked was black): https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/world/asia/japan-comedian-blackface.html

And what’s worse is that this alongside a certain Planet of the Apes reference led to a Pokémon episode being banned in the states just because Ash was dressed up like a Passimian, and that was DESPITE Ash not even looking like he was in blackface at all (and Passimians looking more like lemurs than actual apes. Besides, no one complained about comparisons between Trump and an Orangutan, so what’s the big deal here?).

At this point, complaints about blackface are getting way out of hand. Mary Poppins descended from a chimney, of course she’s going to get black grime on her face and clothing. I’d know this despite not even sitting through all of Mary Poppins (the original, I haven’t even seen Returns thanks to boycotting Disney for its stupidity since 2017.).