10 Best Mary Poppins Moments
8. Into the Chalk Drawing / Jolly Holiday
“Why do you always complicate things that are really quite simple? Give me your hand please, Michael. Don’t slouch. One… two…”
Cheeky cockney Bert (Dick Van Dyke and his divisive accent) seems to be plying a different trade every day we encounter him and just so happens to be doing chalk street art as Mary Poppins and the Banks children pass by. In lieu of a normal day out at the park, Mary instead magics the group inside Bert’s drawing.
This serves as Mary Poppins’ biggest technical showpiece moment, making the most of recent advances in animation technology and compositing (chiefly the so-called “yellow screen” or sodium vapor process pioneered in The Birds) in order to transport live-action performers into a Technicolor animated fantasia. The group find themselves dressed in Edwardian postcard holiday outfits and enjoy their day in the animated park interacting with anthropomorphic animals, most prominently a troupe of dancing penguins.
7. Sister Suffragette
“We’re clearly soldiers in petticoats, and dauntless crusaders for women’s a-votes! Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they’re rather stupid.”
After their latest nanny (Elsa Lanchester) hands in her notice in response to Jane and Michael repeatedly running away and being generally unmanageable, the obliviously chipper Mrs Banks (Glynis Johns) arrives home from a suffragette rally and leads the women of the household in a passionate campaign song.
This is the late great Glynis Johns’ showpiece that introduces her character Winifred Banks, one side of the hugely flawed marriage and absentee parents of the Banks household. Unlike her husband, her failings aren’t due to lack of sensitivity to the needs of her offspring or unwillingness to engage with modern ideas, but instead because she is so caught up with her political cause she doesn’t notice troubles at home with her children.
“Sister Suffragette” is a bit of a bop, as the kids say, and is perhaps the first encounter many younger viewers would have with the idea that votes for women had to be fought for just over a century ago.
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6. Chim Chim Cher-ee
“Never was there a more happier crew, than them what sings Chim Chim Chiree Chim Chiroo!”
Bert and Mary lead the Banks children to the London rooftops where they navigate from building to building with the help of Mary’s magical chimney smoke stairways.
It is somewhat surprising to learn that this was the song that got the Sherman Brothers their first Oscar in a film that contained several far more memorable and emotive efforts, such as “Feed the Birds”. It’s a perfectly lovely and well-constructed song though, one that Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke harmonise beautifully together and one which definitely scratches an American anglophile itch as they take in an effective visual pastiche of old London town.