The Revisionist World of Disney: Mary Poppins, Walt Disney and Saving Mr. Banks

Among modern treatises on historical revisionism in popular culture, the greatest of the 20th century was "The Series Has Landed" Futurama, episode two of the first season. The second episode of Futurama, "The Series Has Landed", takes place just after Fry has been thawed after a thousand years of cryogenic sleep and has not yet had time to acclimate to the changed perspectives and priorities of the 31st century. Now a delivery man of an interplanetary delivery service, its first delivery is a trip to the moon. FRY: So where are we going? LEELA: No special place, the moon. FRY: the moon... the moon? the moon-moon!?

LINDSAY: An exotic adventure for Fry, but a mundane trip to, well, Disney World for the rest. AMY: Okay. It is the happiest place orbiting the Earth. LINDSAY: The only thing worth visiting on the moon, in fact, is a mediocre theme park: a thinly veiled allegory of Disney, and this thinly veiled allegory of Disney theme parks also does what Disney World does best. : NARRATOR: No one knows where, when and how man first landed on the Moon, but our engineers believe something like this could have happened. LINDSAY: He revised the story and changed it to fit the needs of the park.

Which park visitors accept without question, but Fry knows is inaccurate. One of the park's iconic attractions as a parody of Pirates of the Caribbean called Whalers on the Moon. TRAVEL MUSIC: But there are no whales, so we tell tall tales and sing a whaling tune! LINDSAY: So pointing out that the line in The Honeymooners was actually Ralph threatening physical violence, or that there were no whalers on the moon, is met with annoyance. FRY: To hell with this fake stuff! LEELA: But what's funny is what's fake! It's boring out there! LINDSAY: People just want to take the park attractions at face value without thinking about the implications of this revised story, and then go home.

ROBOT RALPH KRAMDEN: One of these days, Alice! Bang, zoom, straight to the moon! FRY: That's not an astronaut, he's a television comedian. He was simply using space travel as a metaphor for beating his wife. LINDSAY: For the purposes of this essay, though, it's a pretty apt sum

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of how people tend to get defensive when faced with the idea that the past isn't as simple or as pleasant as they'd like to remember. But it's also a pretty apt parody of Walt Disney World and its tendency to sprinkle fairy dust on, you know, everything. Disney's approach to life, love and history is a little... dated.

Magical, happily ever after wishes have been at the core of the Disney brand for nearly 90 years to the point where, after decades of being one of the dominant creative forces in pop culture, this ethos has inspired countless imitations. Not to mention the countless parodies. CHARACTER: Don't you know that sucking my cock is a serious crime? Punished with fuck you! LINDSAY: Think about how many movies, TV shows, and media you've seen where a character looks into the middle distance, about to pour out their hearts through song, and then someone stops that moment. CHARACTER: Stop it, stop it, you're not going to sing a song while I'm here!

LINDSAY: Even Disney is involved in this now. GISELLE: How do you know? ROBERT: Don't sing, it's okay. You know, let's just walk. LINDSAY: Part of the post-Eisner rebranding we've seen has to do with the fact that Disney's message of hopes, dreams, and happily ever after must be carefully repackaged to appeal to modern audiences, even contextualized as necessary just to survive. the day. today on this miserable ball of earth we call earth. Enchanted is explicitly about the balance between the naivety of the old Disney model and the demands of the real

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. Frozen, Disney's most lucrative animated film to date, is all about "Girl, you can't marry a guy you just met" bait and switch.

ELSA: You can't marry a man you just met. ANNA: you can if it's true love! LINDSAY: And more. KRISTOFF: Did you get engaged to someone you just met that day? LINDSAY: Not only does Moana deconstruct the chosen narrative, but it even introduces a character who is basically every high school leader trying to act like she doesn't already cry to Bambi. MOANA: The Ocean chose you for a reason. MAUI: If you start singing, I'm going to vomit. LINDSAY: Honesty is for girls. Even Tangled makes it clear that Rapunzel and Eugene wait a few years before settling down.

EUGENIO: Did Rapunzel and I ever get married? And after years and years of asking, asking, asking, I finally said yes. LINDSAY: No more nonsense about the three-day commitment. And the strange thing is that this meta-examination of the Disney brand works: people like it. People will pay for Disney to get meta over Disney. BELLA: I'll be in my room. BELE: Get your own movie! LINDSAY: Then enter Saving Mr. Banks from 2013. The most meta of Disney's recent trends is metatextual analysis within the Disney Company, since it's really about the spirit of Disney and how Disney adapts everything it touches. .

Poor A.A. The Milne studio, one of his most famous films, and Walt Disney himself played by America's favorite uncle: the giver of good hugs and David S. Pumpkins, Tom Hanks. On the surface, Saving Mr. Banks tells the true story of P. L. Travers and the culmination of his twenty-year resistance to selling Walt Disney the rights to adapt his beloved children's books, Mary Poppins. Adapting these books had been Walt's passion project for decades. WALT: But then she gave me one of your books and, oh my God, my imagination caught fire, absolutely on fire. And those embers have burned ever since, as you know.

TRAVERS: Yes, yes. Walt: 20 years. TRAVERS: That's what you keep saying. LINSDSAY: But Travers resists because he sees Disney movies as sentimental nonsense. TRAVERS: Mary Poppins doesn't sing. LINDSAY: The making of the Mary Poppins narrative is intertwined with flashbacks to Travers' childhood and her relationship with her father: a loving, charming man who adored his daughter and who was also a chronic alcoholic, and who died when she was 7 years. The film is titled Saving Mr. Banks because much of the negotiations between Travers and Disney Studios feature serious concerns about Mr. Banks' Mary Poppins character. TRAVERS: I told the illustrator that I didn't like facial hair, but she decided to ignore me.

This time this is my movie and I will get my way. ASSISTANT: Mrs. Travers, this is a specific request from Walt. TRAVERS: Why? LINDSAY: The film even goes so far as to imply that the reason Travers is so reluctant to give the rights to Disney is because she's missing closure about her own father's death, which is why it's so important to the emotional climax of Mary Poppins. be about Mr. Banks. Yes. But this topic is complicated in a way that most biopics are not. And people are less forgiving of the creative liberties taken here in order to create a compelling narrative.

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Walt Disney's portrayal of Mr. Banks as a shrewd businessman but basically a good guy? He has ruffled some feathers. DISNEY: Now, there are all kinds of entrepreneurs and all kinds of entertainment businesses. But it is a fact that only one or two men are at the top of any given group. LINDSAY: This film has been described as a piece of pro-Disney propaganda: historical revisionism in and of itself. Which, you know. Good. It is. WALT: The mouse is family. And before you fill the comments section with rants about how long Uncle Walt was racist or anti-Semitic, let's just say that's a discussion for another day.

A long one. Check your sources. So this movie was complicated not only because one of the main characters is Walt Disney. TRAVERS: Do you always get everything you want, Walter? WALT: More or less. LINDSAY: Who was the patron saint of all that is good and pure in humanity, or the very face of evil, depending on who you ask, but also because of the underlying theme of artistic integrity versus betrayal, and well, such maybe betrayal? It's best for everyone, Pam! That's how it is. Get into bed with the mouse, Pam. With the mouse! But despite all that, I honestly feel like this movie is underrated.

The quality of the film is buried by these comments that Walt was a very bad man, and of course the film assumes that he is not. On the one hand, Saving Mr. Banks is the extremely rare father-daughter film that isn't tied to the daughter finding herself through marriage, but is instead a broader journey into self-identity seen with most often in father-son movies. Emma Thompson does an incredible job being absolutely charming and relatable despite being an abject and unequivocal idiot. TRAVERS: Will the child be a nuisance? It's an 11 hour flight. LINDSAY: The Disney brand is so overwhelming and easy to dislike, and Disney itself is so sneaky and almost disingenuous, that even if you're in life as a Disney fan, you can still totally see where it's coming from.

Tom Hanks is, well. It's Tom Hanks. TRAVERS: I won't let them turn her into one of your silly caricatures. LINDSAY: But as far as the need to see Walt portrayed warts and all, I can see the desire for that, but that wasn't this movie. MARY POPPINS is an interesting movie to make a movie about in general. Not only was it a technological breakthrough with the combination of live action and animation, but it was also Disney's last major film project before he died. Now say what you want about old Uncle Walt, but the man was a capitalist.

So it's interesting that this was the project I was willing to go to great lengths to get the rights to, since it's the only film from the Disney era that's at least...curious about socialism. JANE: Can we please feed the birds? MISTER. BANKS: For what? MICHAEL: I have two pennies from my piggy bank! JANE: Just this once, please? MISTER. BANKS: Spending your money on a bunch of rogue birds? Certainly not! LINDSAY: But I want to redistribute the wealth, Father! MARY POPPINS is one of those children's movies without antagonists, but if there is a villain in Mary Poppins, it's the Bank.

And I'm usually not a fan of the "dad, you work too hard" lessons in movies, but I think it works in Mary Poppins because of the way it satirizes the fragility of the banking system and the way it relates to Mr. Banks . 'Biased priorities. BANKER: And how much money do you have, young man? MICHAEL: Tuppence, but I wanted to feed the birds. LINDSAY: A boy who wants to feed the birds causes a bank run. MICHAEL: Give it back to me! LINDSAY: The people will take over the means of production! Feed the birds! LINDSAY: The biggest source of conflict in the Mary Poppins universe, at least in the Disney version, is how the obsession with money and prestige comes at the cost of being good parents.

And the irony of all this: the story of the parents, the curiosity about socialism, the bank being evil, apart from the mentions of Mr. Banks being unhappy, this whole story was not in the original book, but was added by Disney. Part of this was giving the story a more movie-like shape, giving the characters more of an arc, and part was making it more relatable to 1960s families who might not understand why a family with a ranch ...A stay-at-home mom would even need a babysitter, if she didn't have some hobby or activity to do throughout the day, which is actually addressed in Mr.

Banks. TRAVERS: Why the hell have you turned Mrs. Banks into a suffragette fool? ANIMATOR: I wonder if Emmeline P would agree with that adjective. LINDSAY: And most of the things that are changed from the source material: giving the family itself an arc to rediscover themselves and each other, is really the biggest change from the Travers books and ends compromising most of the plot of Saving Mr. Banks. ANIMATOR: It seems strange that Mrs. Banks allows her children to spend all their time with the babysitter when she doesn't have a job to speak of. LINDSAY: The structural changes that Travers most resisted ended up being necessary for it to be seen as a feature film.

So it's noteworthy that Mary Poppins exists, and the story of how it came to be is compelling. Even if, say, creative liberties were taken. Yes, the movie ultimately favors Walt's perspective. It would be difficult to say that it celebrates Travers' work more than Disney's TRAVERS: Rain Brings Life. DRIVER: Also the sun. LINDSAY: But overall, with the exception of this scene where Disney and Travers have the discussion about fatherly issues, WALT: It's not the kids he's coming to save. She is his father. He is your father. LINDSAY: The movie is realistic. If you move some elements and characters from the timeline.

Disney traveled to London to meet with Travers, several times in fact. But it wasn't last minute and probably didn't involve any stories about tragically flawed parents. WALT: You better be quick, Walt. You better put those newspapers on that porch andUnder that storm door, Dad will lose his temper again and show you his belt buckle. LINDSAY: Disney's story about forced child labor is true, but he never went on record framing it as anything other than good, hard, honest American work. Ralph, the car driver, and his disabled daughter did not exist, but he was a composite character of Disney Studios workers who befriended Travers during his stay.

RALPH THE DRIVER: Well, hot dog. LINDSAY: There's no evidence that Travers danced and sang to fly a kite, but he did sing to feed the birds on those tapes, and yes, he insisted on those tapes. TRAVERS: No, no, we can't have that. That would be pretty un-English. Disney turned down Travers an invitation to the film's premiere. WALT: It's not an easy decision for me, but do you know what she is like? We got press, interviews, cameras, LINDSAY: And she made a big deal about it and showed up just to spite him. She went to Disneyland and hated it, but Walt wasn't there and they didn't ride any carousels.

Walt wasn't even present during the two-week meeting: he calmed down after the first day because he got very frustrated with Travers and then let the Sherman brothers deal with her. ANIMATOR: Does it matter? TRAVERS: You can wait outside. LINDSAY: But in terms of adaptive criticism, more people had problems with the idea that P . L. Travers was finally satisfied with the film version of Mary Poppins. Travers cried at the premiere, but not because she was moved or because she had a sense of closure, but rather because of the pain that her beloved creation was no longer hers and would never be hers again.

But there's some truth to the idea that he ultimately agreed to it: again, if you stretch the timeline a bit. In a 1977 interview, Travers comments: "I've seen it once or twice and I've learned to live with it. It's glamorous and it's a good movie on its own level, but I don't think it's much like my books." Travers didn't make peace with the film upon release, but he did so after a few decades, admitting that there were parts of the film he liked and even incorporating ideas conceived by Disney's story department into the final Mary Poppins novel in 1988.

It is true, however, that he never made peace with the dancing penguins. WALT: Mrs. Travers, what is bothering you so much right now? TRAVERS: Penguins. The penguins have really bothered me, Mr. Disney. LINDSAY: Others have called the film a character assassination of Travers herself, and the film glosses over or wipes its hands of some of P. L. Travers's less flattering personal stories. WALT: Do you have children? TRAVERS: No, well, not exactly. LINDSAY: We can touch on the ethics of portraying Travers as a frigid fool who just needs to relax and sell himself. TRAVERS: What is all this... joviality?

TRAVERS: If you step foot here with that cart, I'll scream. You can't live on cake alone! TRAVERS: I hope we crash. LINDSAY: But in terms of this story, to put it diplomatically, Travers was not a good team player. If the film softens Walt Disney, it also softens Travers. But perhaps the most common complaint with the film was not about Travers, but the way he softens Walt's edges. And that is definitely so. CHARACTER 1: See how it goes up in the word down? CHARACTER 2: in the word down goes up. CHARACTER 3: It's ironic. WALT: Forget ironic, it's iconic. I won't be able to stop singing that for weeks!

Walt was notoriously stingy with praise and basically never gave it, but here's the whole "call me Walt!" WALT: Oh, Walt, call me Walt. Mr. Disney was an old man, wasn't he? LINDSAY: And the loving and supportive patriarch towards his staff. Per Disney Studios edict, Walt is never seen smoking, but he does refer to it, is seen putting out cigarettes, and is literally presented with a sickly cough off-screen. Don't smoke, children. But here's the thing: Walt's flaws are not what this movie is about. I mean, did we really need a scene where he takes a break from filming Mary Poppins to talk about the evils of communism?

This film is not about Walt Disney, but about the anguish of giving up one's own creative vision and entrusting it to a shameless capitalist. It's about the argument of whether or not doing such a thing is for the greater good, and what that greater good is. Bring happiness to everyone's life or educate children? TRAVERS: Mary Poppins is the very enemy of fantasy and feeling. She's sincere: she doesn't sugarcoat the darkness of the

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these kids will eventually, inevitably, come to know. She prepares them for it! She deals with honesty! LINDSAY: But above all, it's about a woman's relationship with her long-dead father, and how our stories and families influence who we are and how we frame our history and our worldview.

It's about the conflict between two creative visions: do we see history with rose-colored glasses, or do we always need to be honest about the cruelties of the world? WALT: Have you never been to Disneyland? That is the happiest place in the world. . TRAVERS: Mr. Disney, I...I...can't begin to tell you how uninterested...no, positively disgusted I am at the thought of visiting his...dollar printing machine. LINDSAY: But given Disney's approach to framing culture and history, you can see Travers wouldn't be thrilled. Disney movies and theme park attractions are traditionally less set in a culture or place in history, but rather in a version of a culture or place in history.

A very Disney version. CHARACTER: Do you want to buy a sundial? Like Snow White is inspired by Germany because the original fairy tale is German, and I guess there's some Snow White stuff in Germany at Epcot, but there's nothing really distinctively German about Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Or Beauty and the Beast, set in France, CHARACTERS: Bonjour! Good day! Good day! Good day! Good day! LUMIERE: After all, miss, this is France! But it's nothing like real France. Like when you watch Beauty and the Beast and don't think "oh, Beast and/or his descendants are going to meet a horrible fate in a few years." In quotes, South America, end of quote, we have the happy exploits of the 3 gentlemen in the Saludos Amigos movies...

The list goes on and on. Disney's approach strips these tales down and reduces them to broad cultural signifiers that a Western audience would happily consume. It gets rid of anything that might be considered too salacious for the Disney brand and changes the setting so that you're no longer thinking "this is a French fairy tale," but rather "this is a Disney fairy tale." Part of Walt Disney's evil genius was how effectively he branded everything he produced as unmistakably Disney. That was the business model in 1961, so you can see where Travers would assume that this is what he would pass on to his beloved Mary Poppins.

TRAVERS: I won't let them turn her into one of your silly caricatures. LINDSAY: And she would be right. Cultural appropriation and historical revisionism are integral to the Disney brand, whether for narrative purposes or as a meta-commentary on how the Disney Corporation views or changes itself. We could go down the rabbit hole of real-world examples of historical revisionism; The thing is, I promised myself I would keep this video under an hour, so let's take a look at the Disney World attractions. ACTOR: Let freedom ring! LINDSAY: There is nothing in the world of Disney that is not portrayed through that distinctive Disney filter.

Main Street USA was designed to be an homage to Walt's childhood hometown, but no one is going to deny that it's a very whitewashed and idealized version of small-town America. But if you want some real Disney-style historical revisionism, head to the Hall of Presidents! I would have gotten in, but unfortunately the trip is closed because the president is... ...evil. Sometimes Disney decides to update its attractions based on changing sensibilities. Pirates of the Caribbean has this segment which is currently called the Bride Auction and will be replaced when the attraction closes for maintenance in 2018. It features... "wenches" who are sold as chattel.

They are all tied up and some are crying. RIDE NARRATOR: Hit your colors, minx! No need to expose your superstructure! LINDSAY: Fun for the whole family! But when the Disney Company tries to respect that, yes, maybe they should change some things, it meets resistance. And that's perhaps the problem with rooting so much of your brand in nostalgia: Every time you point out that maybe some parts of what you're consuming might be unethical, people take it as an assault on their childhood. No, what do you mean there were no whalers on the moon? People who consume the Disney version of history and culture, on some level, know that it is false.

But there's something almost traumatic about pointing out that there might be something amoral about this kind of historical revisionism, something at odds with our modern sensibilities, or even with the fun nature of what would otherwise be a whimsical non-slavery journey. So the problem is not always just the framing, but the audience. Once you frame a story, a culture, or even a history in a certain way, it can be very difficult to unframe it. And the truth is, Mary Poppins has become a Disney movie in the popular consciousness, much more so than it is seen as a beloved children's book series.

The Lord of the Rings is still a book first. The Chronicles of Narnia are still books first. But Mary Poppins is a Disney movie. The film's main conflict ultimately arises between the two people using a fictional property as a means to reconcile difficult memories of their parents. ASSISTANT: He wants to know why they gave Mr. Banks a mustache. WALT: Oh, I asked for that. For that. ASSISTANT: Yes, they told him that, but he wants to know why. WALT: Because I asked for it. LINDSAY: Both Travers' and Walt's narratives within the film are shown to be wrapped up in an obsession with preserving and mythologizing the memories of their parents.

It ends up being the crucial similarity they share with each other. WALT: I have my own Mr. Banks. And even if this scene didn't really happen, which it didn't, there is a deep truth to the idea of ​​the scene. WALT: Rarely is there a day when I don't think about that eight-year-old boy delivering newspapers in the snow and old Elias Disney with that leash on his fist. I'm tired of... remembering it that way. LINDSAY: The fictional Walt in the scene knows and understands that his father was flawed and even cruel. He hasn't forgotten what happened. But it is better for him to focus on positive memories than negative ones, and this influences his view of the world and his business.

WALT: We all have our sad stories, but don't you want to finish the story? Let it all go and have a life that is not dictated by the past? LINDSAY: So while the scene may be totally fake in terms of things that actually happened in the real world, it does explain why people love Disney's pink filter. Part of Disney's genius was to commodify the way people mythologized culture, especially American culture. He found a way to promote and sell it because, here's the thing: historical contextualization and, yes, revisionism, is always inevitable, especially in times of national tension.

Sometimes this type of identity-branding mythologizing can be about recapturing one's former glory and scapegoating others, but Disney's mythologizing was about feeling good about what you already had and ignoring the bad parts. whether that's the entirety of the story or not. Ultimately, this film explores the very human desire to protect the memories of the people we love: fictional people and characters. TRAVERS: Why did you have to make it so cruel? He wasn't a monster. LINDSAY: Even if they aren't always happy memories. Take this line here: WALT: Maybe not in life, but in the imagination. Because that's what storytellers do.

We restore order with imagination. We instill hope. Over and over again. LINDSAY: This line almost seems like a response to one of the oldest criticisms of Disney storytelling: that it's maudlin, that it whitewashes history and culture. But I like how the movie compares it to what people actually do in real life. Not that Walt Disney invented this by any means. He just figured out really effectively how to sell it. As Walt himself put it in an outburst: And here's the problem with whalers on the moon: if the history, culture and narratives have been revised to fit a sanitized or completely false narrative, the responsibility falls on the consumer, well, PLEAKLEY: Educate yourself!

LINDSAY: And the truth is, most people won't. It's kind of poetic that the crux of this movie, its emotional thesis, is the least historically accurate thing about the movie, and also a big reason why people feel a little iffy about this movie, because it reads like a corporate apology. propaganda for increasing intellectual property for the greater good of commodification and mass consumption, which, you know, it is. and I feel thatthere's this kind of expectation where even if you admit it, you have to condemn it wholeheartedly and, well, I can't. Because I think you can have that discussion about who owns the ideas once they're in the public consciousness, and at the same time admit that Mary Poppins, the movie, even if it doesn't stick to the books as much as Travers wanted, MARY: That will do it, thank you.

LINDSAY: It's a positive thing for the world and I'm glad it exists. It's a great movie. It stands, and even if the corporate-approved Tom-Hanks-Movie-Walt says that Mary Poppins is going to make people happy while dollar signs literally come out of her eyes, just look at this three-year-old girl. in her makeup. A desired trip to Disney World to meet Mary Poppins. FATHER: She watched her over and over again when she was in the hospital last year. He kept her going. LINDSAY: I'm sorry, there's something in my eye. Life has no clear theme that you can fit into a two-hour film, but as human beings we crave narrative satisfaction with the stories we tell, so this film can at the same time be an almost unethical treatise on how, after Having been relentlessly shot down by a major studio, selling your intellectual property to a large corporation can, in some ways, contribute to the greater good despite depriving you of autonomy over your own creation, and can be a thoughtful piece about how that we link much of our personal identity. to the fictions and stories we make, and how difficult it can be to let them go.

It can be both!