10 Best Mary Poppins Moments
5. Let’s Fly a Kite
“With tuppence for paper and strings, you can have your own set of wings. With your feet on the ground you’re a bird in flight, with your fist holding tight to the string of your kite!”
Following his Come to Jesus moment, Mr Banks finds himself in a frivolous mood and so decides to take his children to the park to fly a kite, encountering his remarkably changed colleagues from the bank along the way.
Mr Banks returns from losing his job a changed man, a father who has remembered how to love again and how to communicate not only with his own son and daughter but his own inner child as well. It’s a jarring sight at first to see George skipping through the door dishevelled and manic but more alive than he’s been in years.
David Tomlinson didn’t have the strongest voice in the world, but he could really act his way through a song, and this delicate little ditty accompanying the Banks’ first family day out in years (along with the promise of happier times to come) really lifts your spirits.
4. Step in Time
“Kick your knees up, step in time!”
On the London rooftops, Bert introduces Mary and the Banks children to his chimney sweep brethren who proceed to break out in an elaborate, heel-clicking dance number that eventually spills out through the Banks family’s fireplace.
The most stereotypically cockney of Mary Poppins’ musical numbers, referencing musical hall standards and rhyming slang but also serving as the film’s dance spectacular centrepiece, this is the number that was most explicitly referenced and essentially remade in Rob Marshall’s Mary Poppins Returns (“Trip a Little Light Fantastic”).
The ensemble playing Bert’s soot-covered colleagues are a truly impressive group, and the sequence builds and builds in momentum and complexity, incorporating Mary and Bert and eventually the Banks family’s servants.
Recommended for you: Once More with Feeling: 10 More of the Best Remakes
3. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
“Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious, if you say it loud enough, you’ll always sound precocious!”
The grand finale to their chalk drawing holiday adventure, Mary and a load of animated Pearly Kings and Queens sing about one of the longest, hardest to say made-up words ever conceived.
Mary has just comfortably won the carousel horse race and expresses her joy with one of the catchiest, ear-wormy nonsense songs ever put to screen.
With the back-and-forth with Bert and the contributions of several of Disney’s voice acting mainstays, it’s silly and ridiculous but an incredibly well conceived and performed sequence.
An instant star in her film debut, Julie Andrews somehow comes out of this not only with her obvious talent and dignity completely intact but she is never upstaged by her showier animated co-stars either.
