British opinion of Mary Poppins film?

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Although I haven't seen "Saving Mr. Banks", from reading a related article I have come to wonder how most British (and especially English) people reacted to the Walt Disney film from 1966.

I saw it as a young person after having read the book. I don't recall thinking it a bad effort at presenting the story as a musical. It also had the highest production quality possible at the time.

It seems P. L. Travers was horrified by what Disney Studios did with her material but her opinion seems to have been somewhat influenced by a widespread fear in post-WWII England of the influence of US popular culture. I don't think British people feel quite so threatened nowadays as then.

Do British people mostly sympathize with Ms. Travers?

In contrast, had Carlo Collodi seen what Disney did with Pinocchio, I could imagine him being quite incensed. In comparison with Mary Poppins, Pinocchio was made into a quite different sort of story from the book. But Mr. Collodi had already been dead for decades at the time and his heirs were most likely too distracted by WWII to bother suing. Not that Pinocchio is a bad film, but I would have forgiven Collodi had he taken exception to it.

P. L. Travers reportedly wept through the entire screening of the MP film. I can't help thinking that a bit of an overreaction.

As an artist and writer, I can understand how upsetting it could be to have to stand by and watch someone else turning your carefully, personally crafted characters and creations into something that skews far afield from your private vision (in fact, I have had that experience and it can be galling to see an inept hack mangle one of your children).

Sadly, that's the deal with the Devil one makes when you accept money for your work and turn it over to another party. No matter how many safety clauses you include, they'll always find a way to screw it up. William Peter Blatty made absolutely certain that Warner Brothers and William Freidkin remained true to his novel when they did 'The Exorcist,' then just when he thought he could sit back and breathe a sigh of relief, WB shoots him in the foot with 'Exorcist 2: The Heretic,' which he had no connection to.

I never read the 'Mary Poppins' book. I can't remember if I'd ever heard of it before this film turned up, though I can't imagine how I missed it.

I have never read the book ( I want to find a copy though) and I don't know much about the author, but I enjoy the film.
I think that I can say that the majority of us are proud of the English quirky/eccentric stereotype and I think that the film portrays that well through the various characters and situations e.g. the Admiral firing the canon at exactly the same time everyday and the Banks family treating it as a normal occurance, despite the fact that it makes the whole house rattle.

"The whole world takes its time from Greenwich...but Greenwich, they say, takes its time from Admiral Boom!"

Speaking as a British person myself (and only in my own opinion)... Mary Poppins is merely an American movie adaptation of a book, so of course it's to be taken with a pinch of salt and not too seriously. It was filmed in the 1960s after all, and it's a children's movie.

I can empathize with P.L. Travers in one degree -- it must be horrible seeing your character being turned into something unrecognisable except for the name but that's the cost of signing over your property-rights to a third party; Butch Hartman made a very strong point of advising against it (for better or worse, judging by the quality of his material the last decade) as did J.K. Rowling, and I wonder if Akira Toriyama (Dragonball Z), Phillip Pullman (His Dark Materials, adapted as the Golden Compass), Christopher Paolini (Eragon), Ursula K Le. Guin (Tales of Earthsea) and Dianna Wynn Jones (Howl's Moving Castle) felt the same way when their respective mediums were adapted into movies, liberties taken and all.

Anyway, staying on subject here, whilst Disney's Mary Poppins doesn't share that much with P.L Travers' original book counterpart, there are at least some elements that survived, like the British stolidness and whatnot (albeit caricatured). And whilst it's not Travers' Mary Poppins, there's no denying that without the Disney version, not many people would know of the books from when she came. At least, that's how I see it.

Dick Van Dyke does the absolute most rubbish accent ever attempted by a Yank. (Ever)
He claims they gave him an Irish accent coach.
It is humorous in it's own way.
Overall, I loved it as a child, but when I see it now it seems well, operatic. (Simply too many songs, but on the other hand, they're all beautiful.)
Love the special effects….
Love Dick Van Dyke as the doddering bank president clutching at the children's thruppence.

Now I think about it actually, without Disney's Mary Poppins, we may not have had Nanny McPhee, who is much closer in spirit to P.L. Traver's Mary...

Perhaps it would have gone down in the most delightful way with a spoonful of sugar?