Mary Poppins: An Original Walt Disney Records Soundtrack (1964 Film)

Mary Poppins: An Original Walt Disney Records Soundtrack (1964 Film)
If not for all the other highlights of Walt Disney's incomparable pop cultural legacy, it would be tempting to call Mary Poppins his crowning achievement. Released just two years before his death, the innovative live-action/animation/musical hybrid became an instant classic. It was nominated for 13 Academy Awards and a winner of 5 (including Best Actress for Julie Andrews and Best Musical Score and Best Song Oscars for the brother team of Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman). It's no stretch to call the Mary Poppins score the Shermans' most memorable of their 40-plus-year association with Disney. Boasting at least three bona fide classics ("A Spoonful of Sugar"; the Gilbert and Sullivan-esque romp, "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"; and Oscar winner, "Chim Chim Cher-ee") and at least as many other contenders, the Shermans' score held the technical tour de force together while giving it a sense of ageless wonder to match the powers of its titular magical nanny. This edition restores the previously abridged "Step in Time" sequence to its original length and offers a terrific 16-minute bonus track for collectors: the Sherman brothers' reminiscences about their work on the landmark film interspersed with four of their original song demos. --Jerry McCulley
Customer Review: Has it really been 44 years?
I remember taking our children--11, 8, 5, and 4--to see Mary Poppins when it was first released. My, how time flies! The music is still just a delightful as it was in 1964--not what adult tastes might call a great musical, but certainly an entertaining musical that plays not only to children's ears. At the age of 75, I still find this a happy listen.
Customer Review: Mary Poppins - the anarchist mentor :)
From the internet enclycopedia Wikipedia: "Several film scholars have written interpretations of the film, including several attempts by structuralist semiologists suggesting that the film has a subliminal and symbolic subtext, intended to prepare America's youth for the political radicalism of the 1960s. Such analysis generally points to politically progressive or radical themes touched on in the film, including women's suffrage, the plight of the homeless, and animal rights, as well its mockery of British Naval militarism, and the anti-Capitalist implications of the Banks' children fomenting a panic at their father's bank. The scholars' analyses also suggest that the children's list of requirements for a new nanny can be viewed as a sort of seminal political document (similar to the Magna Carta or Declaration of Independence) and Mary Poppins "pops in" as a sort of anarchist mentor, who consorts with chimney sweep Bert and his friends, iconoclastic representatives of a blighted urban proletariat, in an Edwardian London fattened by imperialism in its final days before World War I." Do we need further reason to love and adore the seemingly oh-so-sugary innocent supernanny? The musical and it's soundtrack is highly recommended for all children, and for adults who refuse to "grow up" too! It's preferable to the watered down stage version, which seems to avoid and/or ignore social politics alltogether.


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