Name: Mary Poppins 2.
Age: Gestating.
Appearance: Sacrilegious.
Wait a minute, Mary Poppins 2? Yes.
As in a sequel to the 1964 film, Mary Poppins? Yes.
On what conceivable level is that a good idea? A commercial one.
Of course. Silly me. Having had success with the musical Into the Woods, and with remakes of Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland, Disney is turning next to Mary Poppins, according to Variety. Rob Marshall, who directed Into the Woods, is reportedly going to “helm” the new movie, which will return to the same characters 20 years after the original events.
So in the 1930s, during the rise of nazism? Erm, yes, although we don’t know how prominently that will feature.
Are all my most precious childhood memories just a resource to be commercially exploited? Yes. This is the Walt Disney Company, remember. That’s kind of what they do. Although, to be fair, they did also create a lot of those memories in the first place.
But Mary Poppins! She disappeared back up into the London sky with her umbrella! She did, and you may recall that the last line of the film is Bert saying to her: “Don’t stay away too long.” Actually, it’s a bit weird that no sequel was made before, as the film is based on the first of a series of eight books by PL Travers. In the second book, Mary Poppins comes back down attached to Michael’s kite.
Well I never. There’s also a rather unfortunate chapter in the first book where Mary Poppins takes the children on a tour of the world’s racial stereotypes.
You’re kidding! I am not. It’s called “Bad Tuesday”, and let’s just say it’s a bit 1934. Travers finally changed it in 1981.
Still. This stuff never goes well. Just think of Go Set a Watchman, or The Godfather III. You may be right.
And where are they going to find somebody as prim and pretty and sweet-sounding as Julie Andrews? I’m hearing a lot of early support for Anne Hathaway.
Hmm. That could work. But where will they find someone with a cockney accent as bad as Dick Van Dyke’s? Now that is impossible.
Do say: “Ultra-califragilisticexpialidocious!”
Don’t say: “The sound of this is something quite atrocious!”
