A new report says a new Mary Poppins project is in the works, and this time, the magical nanny is headed to television.
Tom Winchester (Shōgun) of Pure Fiction Television is developing the series, according to Deadline Hollywood.
Winchester is developing the project on behalf of the trustees of the P.L Travers estate. Preliminary talks with Disney are said to be taking place, but at this early stage, there's no guarantee that if the project moves forward, it will stream on Disney+.
If you’ve only ever watched the Mary Poppins movie, diving into the original P. L. Travers book series (created in 1934) might elicit a bit of a culture shock.
The biggest difference boils down to the vastly different tone of the books: Travers wrote a dark, episodic book series, whereas Disney turned it into a warm, cohesive musical packed with heart.
One of the main differences is how Mary Poppins is depicted.
On the page, she isn't the sweet, joyful nanny Julie Andrews made famous. Book-Mary is strict, vain, and has a wickedly-sharp tongue. She snaps at the Banks kids, is in love with her own reflection, and doesn't bother softening her edges.
Disney pulled out 60-grit sandpaper and smoothed down all those prickly corners, reinventing her as a warm, nurturing figure in the 1964 musical, where she is still somewhat vain, as she's "practically perfect in every way," but the musical and whimsical overtones serve to make Poppins a more appealing character.
The storytelling style takes a totally different route, too, as books are more of a loose collection of standalone short stories devoid of a single narrative throughline. Mary blows in and out whenever she feels like it, whereas the Disney movie weaves those chaotic, magical outings into a structured narrative with a definitive emotional payoff for the Banks family.
Travers was infamously not happy with the original Mary Poppins movie, and her battle with Disney serves as the basis of the 2013 biographical film, Saving Mr. Banks, which starred Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson. Hanks played Walt Disney and Thompson portrayed P.L. Travers.
Travers reportedly hated the film's animation sequences, particularly the one involving the dancing penguins. She felt that it made her sophisticated story, which took inspiration from her own childhood and relationship with her father, trivial and childish.
If this project moves forward, it would be the second television adaptation of Mary Poppins as CBS aired an adaptation of Mary Poppins in December 1949 as an episode of the popular anthology series Studio One.