Now then, what'd be nice?

We'll start with raspberry ice and then some cakes and tea.

You brought your references, I presume?

May I see them?

Oh, I make it a point never to give references.

A very old fashioned idea to my mind.

Is that so?

We'll have to see about that then, won't we?

Now then, in a most delightful way.

Supergirl.

Super.

Super.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Yes.

Well done.

You said it.

The biggest word you ever heard.

And this is how it.

Why do you always complicate things that are really quite simple?

Give me your hand, please.

Michael, don't slouch.

One, two.

WDW Radio, you, information station.

Mary Poppins is practically per but the process behind it was emotional, unpredictable and filled with incredible stories that most fans have never been told.

I think there are very few perfect.

Quote unquote movies in this world.

Jaws, the Shawshank Redemption, the Shining, Back to the Future.

And from Disney, I think there's really only one on this list and it's Mary Poppins.

This week I'm joined by author and Disney historian Todd James Pierce, who whose new book Making Mary the Sherman Brothers, Walt Disney and the Creation of Classic Film uncovers a deeper, more emotional and often surprising history behind the film.

And together we're gonna explore the Sherman Brothers remarkable journey, Walt Disney's creative vision, and some of the behind the scenes breakthroughs that helped shape one of Disney's most beloved classics.

And I promise this is gonna change the way you watch Mary Poppins forever.

Hello, my friend and welcome to WW Radio, your guide to the Disney parks and experiences and movies from around the world.

I am Lou Mongello and this is show number 843.

Welcome.

Whether this is your first time or you've been with me all 20 years, since the very beginning, welcome back or welcome home.

Couple of quick things before we get started.

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But for now, sit back, relax and enjoy this week's episode of the WDW radio show.

We've all been asked what's the best Disney movie?

But I think what we're really asking is what is your favorite Disney movie?

And for me, I think the answer would most likely be the same because I think there are a few near perfect movies, not just Disney movies that have ever been made.

And I think Mary Poppins is one of them.

And this week we're going to dive into the making of one of the most beloved films in Disney history.

Because it's not just a story about magic and music on the screen, but also about creativity, little bit or a lot of bit of conflict and some.

Vision behind the scenes.

And my guest today is Todd James Pierce.

He is the author of Making Mary Poppins, the Sherman Brothers, Walt Disney and the Creation of the Classic Film.

And his book is going to take us inside the process, from the Sherman Brothers to Walt's Pursuit and the infamous battles with one P.L.

travers.

Todd, good to see you again.

Welcome.

Always good to see you too, Louis.

You know, as somebody who is not.

Just a huge Mary Poppins fan, I've also had the privilege of getting to talk and interview one Dame Julie Andrews, which is sort of like a highlight of anything I've ever done so I'm really excited to explain, to explore really how this film came together and I think why it still resonates and some of the fascinating, probably untold stories that you uncover along the way.

And you and I. I was trying to think about this on the way here.

We go sort of way back and like many, many, many years, I don't even remember how or where we first met.

I think I met you through Jeremy Marks is how I think I first met you.

And I think it was at the first D23 in Anaheim.

The one where Disney had to give away tickets to all the cast members that allowed to film it.

That one, yeah.

But we've always had this shared love of Disney, specifically history and.

Really?

Absolutely.

There's so many projects you've done that I've admired over the years.

Well, this is going to meeting of the mutual admiration society.

There's a lot of love going back and forth.

But do me a favor.

Give me a little bit of the Todd James Pierce origin story, Todd James.

Pierce, as it relates to Disney.

You share it however you think is relevant and appropriate.

Well, so growing up, my grandmother worked at Disneyland for years and years, and she loved it, and they were so good to her back then.

And she knew that I was very interested in this.

You know, when it was like, you know, kind of like when I was a kid, it was an interesting hobby, something that I very much enjoyed.

But through her, I got to meet a lot of people that I should have appreciated way more when I was a kid and maybe had a tape recorder on me, but of course I didn't.

So Herb Ryman, John Hench, people like that, I was able to meet and talk to a little bit.

And then later on, so I started out my professional career as a normal writer, and I also work as a professor, and I published novels and short story collections and textbooks and things like that.

And then there was a certain point where I started to remember a lot of the stories that I'd first learned about through my grandmother, and I started to explore those.

And those were just so much fun to get into and to talk to people about.

And it was really at the right time, like late 90s, early 2000s, because there had been a lot of work done on the history of Disney in terms of animation.

And most of the major biographies are written by people who are far more interested in animation than they are in parks.

Like, most of the major biographies, I think, have a section towards the end that should be titled.

And then Walt became interested in something else and These many of the people were still around that had developed Disneyland.

They were separated from the company and they could speak more freely.

And there wasn't a whole lot of.

There was the Jansen brothers, but there wasn't a whole lot of people beyond that really trying to, like, systematically collect up their stories and preserve them so they could be shared.

So that.

That's kind of how I got into all this.

I thought I was just going to write one book.

I had such a fabulous time talking to all those people that when it was done, I started thinking, like, well, you know, what else is there here to work on?

Because this is great.

And also I could see what had been done and also what could be done that would be interesting.

Right.

Because there has been this, especially over the last.

We were sort of before we started recording, the two old timers were sort of recounting, you know, some of the earlier days, early war wounds.

Some of the people that we know.

And, you know, love and miss Jim Corkus.

But you also, you know, going back, I guess it's probably six, seven years, you started doing what I don't think really had been done yet, which is bringing more to the forefront, people like Ward Kimball and sort of making the definitive biography of this person who sort of named.

That we've heard, but maybe didn't know as much about, and allowed us who wanted to, you know, dig a little deeper to go into understanding not just the work, but the men or the women who put it out.

Yeah.

So 20 years ago, a person named Paul Anderson that I used to work with quite a bit and used to be very kind of central to this world of Disney history.

We used to have conversations where we could see that the architectural biographies had been written, even if they were very film focused, as opposed to parks focused, and that what was probably coming was that the.

These topics would be subdivided down in two areas, that there would be entire books devoted to projects, maybe an attraction or a film or biographies of people that were central to the Disney effort, that that's where things were going.

And one of the things that I like about what I get to do is I think that Disney fans have this intuitive sense of that they connect with something here that they really love, something about this world that it speaks to them, but they aren't always good at articulating why they have this connection.

And so one of the roles that I try to fulfill is I try to create books or other materials or the podcast that then allows people to explore some reasons or why, or have a sense that they're connecting with people who created these things that give them a deeper understanding not only of the world of Disney, but also as an extension of themselves as well.

And I think that type of self knowledge and having a self depth there through these things is very useful and important.

Well, and I think that's really where this all got started.

You go back, you know, two decades, and the stuff that was being put out was by fans for fans.

Right.

The E Ticket magazine, which, you know, is a.

Is a treasure trove of knowledge.

And like, for me, I wrote the book I wanted to read.

There was no Walt Disney World trivia book.

So I'm like, I'm just going to go out and write it myself.

And I think that's what started to happen was we were some of the first ones, whether it was podcasting articles, Usenet news groups, wherever we were putting.

Stuff out, we were sort of trying.

To find and create and research those stories on our own.

And I think started to usher in this next wave of, you know, like D23.

Not just showcasing a lot of these legends, but.

But bringing their stories to light as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So finding.

Finding ways that people feel like they can connect with something that's close to the films or the parks or the people behind them that they really admire.

I think that, you know, so in ways, I think we're kind of on the upper end of the age group now.

I mean, not to call out any particular numbers, but I really see that the fan world has changed.

And it started to change in the 90s when Disney very consciously moved from an entertainment and hospitality company, which is what it had been from 70 through, like, early 90s, to a lifestyle company.

And I think for people that are maybe our age and older, not us, but I think this whole idea of what's been termed, like, Disney adults is very confusing for them because a lot of people my age, when I have conversations with them, they think of Disney as like, well, yeah, the movies are.

And we liked going on vacation last year, but that's about it.

But if you're 30 years old now, you grew up in a world where on the Disney Channel you had regular series and you had the dcoms.

And this kind of inculcated a lifestyle in which you connected with entertainment in a very different way, far more regularly than when you and I grew up, because there'd be a movie every quarter and then there was the Sunday TV show and a third of the times it was repeats and maybe a few other things, and then the occasional trip to Disney World or Disneyland.

But there wasn't a way to make it a daily activity.

Whereas that's what really changed in the company.

I think that's why that there's this cross talk now between people that are older and people who are younger.

Because the people who are older, I don't think really understand the world that people who are 30 or younger grew up in and how they connect to a fan sensibility or to fandom differently than people who are older.

Because we make all those connections when we're young.

This may be one of the many old man things that I'm going to say, but for us, in order to be able to find and enjoy that content, there was no YouTube.

Right.

We were going out and buying those tins of the treasures from the Disney vault in order to go back and watch some of those early things of Walt on tv.

And we look, we both just came from a weekend that very clearly evidences what you said at destination D23.

That energy in the room, especially when it was about a Goofy movie and things like that was wonderful and wild to see just how passionate those folks that, who that, that was their childhood war about.

That's why I love And I applaud D23 for, for doing things like that.

And wherever your sort of fandom lies, especially like in that time frame, they're able to address it for you and give you an outlet for it and more importantly, give you a room that you know, you're with like minded people.

Yeah.

So I was.

So one of the things that I do when I go to the fan events is I listen to what's going on stage.

But I'm also very aware of crowd reaction because I think that's interesting and also very revealing.

I think that part of the Disney Company ethos right now at these fan events is to kind of throw things out there to see how they go.

Because part of the Disney Company ethos is a confusion about what people truly like.

And so when they brought up films that were somewhat recent, last 10 years, when they brought up the live action Jungle Book, I think that's 2016.

Could be wrong.

It's around there.

Anyways, there was polite applause, right?

There's polite applause.

When they brought up things that were 20 years older, older, it was like Goofy movies, like, you know, like that's, you know, that's old enough to have a sense of mythology in people's minds, whereas 10 years, that's not enough.

And the other interesting, you know, one of my other interesting takeaways in terms of crowd reaction was the repainting of the castle.

It's like, man, that was popular.

Who knew paint was gonn get the.

Biggest reaction over the weekend?

It's like, note to self, the way to make a really good announcement at D23 is to say you're taking away something new and returning it to something that's very old.

The older the better.

Yeah.

The sense of look, Disney's about the way it makes us feel.

Right.

It's nostalgia and sentiment.

And to your point, about what's old for some is classic for others.

We've had sort of the conversation when they announced the closing of Tom Sawyer Island, Rivers of America.

You know, I get the.

For us, the nostalgia and the sentiment.

I think a lot of people might not know who Becky Thatcher might be, but by bringing in cars that.

They're not building that for you and I, they're building that for our kids who can then go to their kids.

This is what I grew up with.

And this was my sort of classic thing that meant so much to my childhood.

And you know, thinking sort of generationally that way in terms of what is coming next.

Yeah, yeah, I can, you know, I. I do miss the layout, the familiar layout of Frontierland, but I.

There's something comforting right about it.

Absolutely.

It's familiar.

It still exists in California.

But I do get that, you know, Tom Sawyer island is a big piece of land that wasn't utilized very well and you know, very expensive to maintain.

For what?

Not generating revenue.

Not generating revenue.

Yeah, it's hard.

There was no Tom Sawyer plush.

And so I do get that.

The thing that I most miss, and it keeps changing in the concept art, is the water feature.

And I would like to have a large water feature over there because otherwise so much of the other water's gone away.

The submarine lagoon's gone, the moat kind of what it used to be in the 70s, gone.

And rivers of America.

In terms of public facing areas, it'd be nice to have a water feature there.

So it's just not one long and.

There'S that kinetic element and the sound that it brings in.

Which I think, to your point, I think Disney listens more than you think that they do in terms of being able to gauge what public reaction.

I think we talked about some stuff at Destination D that sometimes they may talk about things just to sort of see what the response might be.

And it.

This is a, you know, it's a nice segue into talking about Mary Poppins.

Right.

It's this classic movie that you and I grew up with and meant so much to us.

You know, some younger kids might think it's one of those really, really old movies, but.

So why this book and why now?

Okay, so I didn't see Mary Poppins until I was a teenager.

So, like you, I think I grew up in the world before VHS and before Betamax.

And there were those discs before that that had the COVID I forget what they were called.

Laserdiscs.

Yeah, there was laserdisc, but there was an early version of laserdiscs too, that had a plastic cover on them.

And you put the whole plastic cover into a machine.

I forgot what those are.

Right, I know what you mean.

Those.

That's what we.

Yeah, that's what we had.

A cartridge.

It was a cartridge, but it was a long, flat cartridge you put in.

And they would take it out and flip it over.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We had a laserdisc one like another old technology, like a records that you'd put in there.

But we didn't have that other kind.

People are going, listen to these dinosaurs.

Talking about this ancient technology.

We had to hand crank them too, which was wild.

Yeah, I've got to go somewhere in my Model T later today.

So Mary Poppins was not a film that showed up regularly on tv.

There was no real way to watch it unless you saw it in the theaters.

And so I.

Maybe I'd missed.

There was one year I was very sick when I was a kid, so maybe it came out then and I just didn't see it in theaters.

I didn't see it until I was early teenager.

I think I was 13 when I saw it.

And it had a tremendous impact on me.

And so one of the hidden things about Mary Poppins is we see it as kind of like a fantasy film based on the books of Pamela Travers.

It is radically rewritten in the 1960s for Disney by Don Degradi and the Sherman brothers.

And one of the things that they very smartly do is that they sneak in this 1960s narrative to it, even though it's set at the turn of the century.

This is a movie about parents not understanding children.

This is a movie about generational divides.

And that's what, in terms of youth culture, the 50s and the 60s are all about.

It's about these two generations not being able to understand each other.

And so if you think of movies like Rebel Without a Cause, Rebel Without a Cause is a movie about a teenager, Jim Stark, and how he feels that his father doesn't understand him.

Huge success in 1955 I believe.

And that's exactly what Mary Poppins is about.

And so they take a modern social narrative and they dress it up in this turn of the century costuming and music.

Music is mostly turn of the century and late 1800s music styles.

And then they present it to the public and the public relates to it.

But I don't think the public always knows while they're relating to it, because sometimes it's easier to see the fractures and stresses in your own culture when you're watching it in a culture far from you or a long time ago.

And so I saw it when I was a teenager and I grew up in house where my parents were getting divorced for five years.

So in the late 1970s and early 80s, after women's empowerment movements, there was a backlog of divorce cases in California.

And.

And so my.

My parents were getting divorced into the same house for five years.

And I saw it during that period and it really.

I really connected with this film.

I was closer to my mom than my dad.

My dad was a little difficult when I was growing up.

And so I don't think I understood why the film spoke to me until many years later, but it did.

It just really kind of connected with me on that level.

Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, when you think about the film now, the theme where, you know, you talk about sort of parents and children, you know, the story ultimately, you know, critiques parents for putting work above family, you know, And I'm like.

I would sometimes look at it, I'm like, well, is this a children's story or is it a film that really is, you know, a critique of adult priorities and almost more of a wake up call for parents, which I think was sort of very modern for 1964 too.

Right.

And it comes out in a whole slew of these troubled home pictures from Disney.

Two years before Mary Poppins, they create Parent Trap, which is another one of these pictures.

Parents not understanding the kids, and the kids working to kind of rehabilitate the how the parents see them.

So there's this whole kind of stream of pictures that are moving through Disney at this time.

Don degradi and others have this interesting way of looking at Disney projects.

They think that they can create a character in the film that Walt's going to identify with, it's going to move forward faster.

And they very consciously take Mr. Banks, the David Tomlinson character in Mary Poppins, to be the Walt character.

He even has the Walt mustache.

You know, he doesn't have that most of his life.

That's for the film.

And he acts a little bit like Walt.

He's about the same age as Walt.

And so this is the Walt character in the Mary Poppins movie.

But that's very much part of Walt's life.

He's, I think by any standard today we'd call him a workaholic.

He doesn't get home from work many times until seven, eight at night, has dinner after his family sometimes brings work home with him.

He loves work.

He takes his kids when they're younger to the studio on weekends while he works and they play outside.

And so I think there's something that not only in the culture connects with Mary Poppins, but also in Walt Disney that connects with Mary Poppins because this is part of his personal struggle, I think this life, work, balance.

Yeah.

And Disney's like, listen, if you parents don't start following these lessons, we're going to just start killing off at least one parent in all the future movies going forward.

But let's talk about Walt for a second because you talk about this film as one of the three great turning points in his career.

It's Snow White, it's Disneyland and this film.

Why do you think this one of all the great projects that he had, had such a transformational power for the company and maybe even Walt personally?

Sure.

Well, there's.

Let me give you a couple of reasons here.

First of all, it's a financial success in the way that no film had been a financial success for Disney previously.

It is the first time that other studios start copying what Disney had done.

Disney had had animated successes and for the most part, Paramount tries to partner with Fleischer brothers in the 40s.

It doesn't really work out that well.

But mostly other studios don't go down that path.

That's just a unique thing that Disney's doing these animated features.

But here is a live action feature that in terms of money coming in on a limited release, it's just a handful of theaters when it comes out in 1964, pulls in more money than what other studios are making on their films.

And so after this, you start to see other studios imitating Disney style productions.

There's Sound of music, there's Dr. Dolittle.

Dr. Dolittle tries to.

The people making Dr. Doodle try to hire not only Julie Andrews, but the Sherman Brothers to come over.

They're trying to imitate what Walt has done.

So it's the first time that there's such a level of success that it inspires imitation of the other studios.

The Other thing is, we're here today in the Pauley and Disney World would not be Disney World without Mary Poppins.

Before Mary Poppins, Walt is specifically looking for around 5,000, up to 10,000 acres, no more than that.

That's what can be afforded for Disneyland in 1964.

The person that's going to do the land, arrange the land purchasing on Disney side is a lawyer named Bob Foster.

He flies with Walt to.

In secret.

In secret in New York.

He never flies directly to Florida from California, so it's harder to track them.

Which makes no sense today.

Like we're going to use fake names and fly to multiple destinations to get where we want to go.

And no, TSA is fine with that.

Yeah.

So anyways, he goes to New York with Walt and he's there for the opening, some of the opening ceremonies for the World's Fair, and then he comes down to Florida.

Mary Poppins isn't out yet, and his specific directions are to look for around 5,000 acres, maybe up to 10,000, depending.

They need a contiguous plot.

They don't want what they ended up with trying to, like, fill in all the outs.

And so that's his original.

That's his original directions.

And Mary Poppins comes out and makes a ton of money.

And it's only from that money that the Disney World project is then financially able to expand from 5 to 10,000 acres up to 27,000 acres.

So it's many times larger than what it would have been.

And so without Mary Poppins here in the Pali today, we'd be kind of close to the edge of the Disney World property.

Whereas now it goes on forever in that direction.

So it transformed what was possible.

It also gave him a lot of money to improve Disneyland.

The Tomorrow 1967 project is partially with Mary Poppins money.

It gave him a chance to expand out the studio.

It gives the company also a very nice financial buffer when Walt dies.

And that's significant as well, which obviously Walt doesn't know.

Right.

Every movie is a gambler.

It is a role of the dice.

Disney obviously had a lot of successes before Mary Poppins, but the story of, you know, we've all chased a girl.

For a long time, and the story.

Of Walt chasing this for 20 years.

What do you think Walt saw in this story, in these characters that made him chase it and metaphorically chase P.L.

travers for two decades?

That's a good question.

I don't know the answer to that.

There was something in the story that he deeply related to.

He's trying to get the rights going back to the 1940s.

There are two modes with Walt's live action films at the studio.

There are those that need to be produced very quickly.

Many of the live action films during Walt's lifetime go from creating the script to post production in a year.

That's a really familiar model.

And if you look at what the Sherman brothers, during the time they work on Mary Poppins for those four years, they do film after film that started and finished, started and finished, you know, over and over.

Absent Minded professor started and finished.

Summer Magic started and finished.

So they learn a lot through that process also about what they need to do in Mary Poppins to make it different.

But there's this handful of Disney projects that get Disney live action film projects under Walt that get worked on for years that I see as a higher quality than most of the other films that come out.

This is one.

Wow.

My mind just went, Darby o'.

Gill.

My mind is like.

Darby o' Gill is another one that gets worked on for about a dozen years.

And there's these films that Walt seems to think have story qualities that are more important, that deserve longer incubation time.

And the result of that incubation time tends to produce a higher quality film that has better legs to move through history.

Yeah, because you sort of talk about Walt kind of being at a crossroads, Right.

He wanted to make this film for two decades, but it still had this, you know, very much sort of felt like a throwback, even for 64.

So do you think.

Do you think this was more of almost a nostalgic personal project for Walt and.

Or was it more of, hey, we need to take this strategic risk for the company as a whole.

That's a great question.

I think Walt's a very intuitive person.

I think that I've now read anything that he wrote or is attributed to him that I can get my hands on.

I'm sure there's some letters I don't have, and I've listen to all of the interviews that are available.

Walt is more of an intuitive person.

He's not very good at explaining his motivation in abstract language.

That's just not his strength.

So it's hard to say exactly how much of this is intentional and how much of this just kind of feels like the right way to move.

Just my gut.

Right.

Yeah.

And so Mary Poppins is like this fabulous project because on the one hand, it plays into nostalgia.

And so this is a, you know, time in the world before the war, before the Depression, where things were different and can have A little more magical sheen because they're so far in the past.

So it can play to that.

It can play to that older audience in terms of a nostalgia moment.

But the plot structure is a plot structure that's aimed for kids.

It's like, hey, kids, here's something like you're having at your house right now where your parents don't understand you.

And here's maybe how to empathize more with your father.

The father's the one that's not understanding here.

Even though Glynis John's character seems to be equally, equally unplugged from the kid's life to the point where they have a nanny.

And so there's a way to kind of key this into kids and even teenagers as well.

And I'm not sure that if you were to see this film back in 1964 or 65 when it was first released, that if you were a 50 year old adult, that you would understand that the kid's message was tucked in there.

And if you were a 12 year old, I'm not sure that you would understand that this was also a nostalgia film for adults.

So it fulfills multiple audience needs at the same time.

In a way that's pretty sneaky.

And it does.

Well, I always sort of thought of it as there's two different films in the same movie.

When you watch it as a kid.

Oh, I'm getting all choked up.

When I watched it as a kid, you're right.

There were certain messages that I was taking away from it.

I had parents that were loved me very much.

But, you know, and then when I went back and I watched it as a parent, it was a completely different film for me.

Yeah.

And I understood things.

I saw things from my kids eyes and from my parents eyes.

And I'm like, my light bulbs went off and I got it.

Yeah.

And I think it's intentional or not.

It was just sort of brilliant how that happened, you know.

But then I was thinking like, what if, you know, we look Mary Poppins to Disney classic.

It's part of just the zeitgeist of filmmaking again.

I think it's one of the few movies that is in the conversation is, you know, what is a perfect film?

But what if, okay, what if it would have failed?

How do you think that would have changed Walt's legacy or even the parks?

We would have a much smaller park.

Mapo wouldn't.

So they would not have as easily the manufacturing arm for wed.

The money came in at a point where Disney as a company was Poised to expand quite a bit.

And that expansion would have been a lot smaller.

I think Disney, in terms of its image is rejuvenated because of Mary Poppins.

It connects with adults.

So it brings a lot of adults back into Disney Fair, which through this period, Disney is.

So I think of like the Disney films as reflecting Walt's current interest.

And so if you look at the 1950s, there's a lot of very serious documentary style historical films, biopics essentially.

And if you get up to the 60s, you get to a lot of zany comedies.

Humor is more important to Walt in the 60s than it was in the 1950s.

Davy Crockett is not a funny movie, but a very good movie.

Whereas Shaggy Dog, which is the first one that's actually 59, kind of kicks off this trend towards humor.

It's a very.

It's a very funny film that lowers its relation to objective reality in order to increase the comedic value in the film.

And this is.

This is where Walt is at this point.

I've now entirely forgotten.

Got what your question was.

I went on some left, strange left turn.

I had no idea where I was going.

There was some point I was trying to make.

I'd forgotten that my old mind, it's caught up with me.

Well, I mean, that's.

Look, it's okay because there is.

There's so much to this film and there are so many different of levels of depth to it.

But, you know, one of the things that you talk about and I think was brought out a little bit in the Saving Mr. Banks movie.

You know, this film is not just a P.L.

travers story and a Walt Disney story.

I think one of the most striking things that you talk about in the book is how much of the story arc came from the Sherman Brothers, not just the songs themselves.

Do you sort of see them as not just songwriters, but almost, you know, uncredited co screenwriters of the film?

Oh, absolutely.

So the unspoken rule of thumb at Disney during Walt's lifetime was you got one screen credit even if you did multiple jobs.

And so, you know, you can kind of negotiate your one screen credit if you were lucky enough to get one.

Because 50s and 60s, not everyone on a production gets a screen credit.

So you got one screen credit.

But absolutely, this, this is, I think the strength of the Sherman Brothers is Bob wanted to be a literary novelist.

And so he has a pretty good sense of language and of narrative.

And Dick wanted to be.

He wanted to create symphonies, he wanted to create music for the stage, things like that.

And neither one of their Careers were going very well at.

At one point, Bob, to save money so he could focus more on his writing, was living in a child's playhouse.

The children had outgrown it.

It had dirt floors and no plumbing.

I believe his rent was $5 a month.

And Dick, for years and years was working for the to support.

He has an early marriage and an early daughter.

Any get gets divorced, so.

But he has financial responsibilities and he's working at the Aldec Artificial flower Company and he's doing really well at this.

He goes on TV to like on morning shows to talk about how to design artificial arrangements for your office or your home.

He goes to home shows and will talk with people and sell, you know, flowers.

So he's doing pretty well at this to the point that he has significant public appearances.

But neither of these things are what the Sherman Brothers really want to do.

And it's only when they get together, when there's a sense of strong narrative and language and music, that they're able to overcome their individual limitations and together produce something that neither one of them on their own were capable of.

And one of the interesting things in looking at the book.

So I think that personal stories get flattened out over time.

Like you get to this elevator pitch of your personal life.

And Bob and Dick knew what the elevator pitch of their personal life was.

But in going back through the things that I had for both of them, I could go through all of their college writing and they both worked for the college newspaper.

Dick wrote short stories as well.

They were both kind of cross interested in the other's strengths.

And so once they get together, they have one person who understands melody quite well, another person understands a little bit, and one person understands the narrative quite well, and the other person understands a little bit.

And so there's a lot of conversations they could have that would quickly have depth.

Yeah.

See, each brings their own sort of individual strengths to the table and they are stronger when they are combined.

But we talked about Walt and sort of bringing his own personal stories of growing up with his father.

The Sherman Brothers, too, infused a lot of their own childhood into this.

Flying kites with their father.

Some of the funny wordplay, the cobble.

Fobble.

Which I think clearly helped shape what Mary Poppins ended up becoming.

Do you think that.

So talk about sort of how their personal imprint affected not just the story, but certainly the music as well.

Yeah.

So the Sherman Brothers, I think, are really interesting for the Disney studio.

They start out.

They start out as pop, they start out as country western songwriters.

Briefly, and then become pop songwriters in the 50s.

And they first work with a Mouseketeer.

Listeners will think it's Annette, I think, but it's actually Judy Harriet.

And then they move on to work with Annette, a more famous Mouseketeer.

And they're writing songs for a teen audience, even though they aren't teenagers.

And so they understand the musical language of the 1950s.

And so for the Disney, they understand the musical language of the 1950s.

And also what you were saying, Lou, I think, is exactly right.

They're also including things from their own childhood in the 1930s into those songs.

And so these songs, too, have that bifurcated direction for different generations.

And so if you're younger, like watching the Parent Trap, let's Get Together, there's a melody there that speaks to a younger audience.

But there's also a sensibility in those songs that speaks to an older audience.

And so it's a way of kind of bringing these.

These two worlds together.

For Mary Poppins, I think the songs mostly have a lot of drive and pep in them.

They're extremely easy to listen to.

And I think that that kind of picks up a lot of the musical energy for youth.

But also, like you're saying, they.

They include a lot of the sensibilities that would appeal to an older audience.

And what they're trying to do with these songs, in particular, Walt's impressed with them because these are two people, probably more so because of Bob, that understand historically based narratives.

They understand what Walt calls period.

So how to use music to amplify some setting aspects of a movie.

And so what they are trying to do is they're going back to listen to things that their father, Al Sherman, who was also a composer, liked when they were young.

They're going back to listen to English songs from the early 1900s and to write songs like them as a way of emphasizing, grounding the period of the picture through the music that's in it.

We talked about how this movie, for me, was sort of two different movies.

What I watched as a kid and what I watched as an adult.

I hate to admit this now, but as a kid watching it at home, there was a moment in the film that I would get up and walk across the room, which is what we did.

Hit the fast forward button on my vcr.

Clunk.

Like the physical fast forward.

Because I didn't, like Feed the birds.

Okay.

Right.

I just.

It's thematically and just musically it's very different than all everything else that was up.

I'm like, oh, this is such a downer.

Like, it's such a sad thing.

And I didn't understand it.

And then as it became an adult, it's sort of the thing I fast forward to, right.

I love the song.

We know that.

The Story of Walt.

What sort of.

Why do you think that song sort of in such a good way sticks out and is so different?

Like, and how much do you think of Richard and Robert's own experiences, whether it's growing up, whether it's from the war, whatever it might be, influenced the creation of that song?

So this is another great question.

And so Dick was the talker of the two.

And so many years ago, when I was going through over on a podcast that I have was going through Samir Tour with the Shermans is like, well, I wanted to include a little bit of voice from Dick and Bob.

And I had hours and hours and hours of Dick.

And it's like, oh, here's my eight minutes, Bob.

So I think the answer to that question is that Dick was closer to his parents for his entire life.

Bob wasn't.

Bob had a very wild streak following the war with a lot of disillusionment.

When he goes to college, he has kind of a crazier college experience than Dick.

Dick has a very conservative college experience.

And.

And so I think it's probably Bob that brings in the sense of, you know, the.

The parents being apart, not understanding that Tuppence, something of value, needs to be given to kids regularly, because that wasn't part of his experience.

Only I don't think he talks about it much in interviews.

He talks very, very little.

Especially after Mary Poppins.

Dick was almost always the voice of the Sherman brothers.

And Bob would add a few things here and there occasionally, and then also join in on the choruses when they were singing.

And this is not about me, but just contextually for story.

So, you know, back in 2008, just because I wanted to talk to the person who wrote the anthem for My child at Mary Poppins, I was able to track again.

Richard Sherman, D23, didn't exist.

He wasn't on stage.

We didn't hear from these guys a lot other than sort of quietly in the background recording interviews or transcribing interviews.

So I was able to find him.

I mean, it sounds stalkery, but sort of found his phone number, like in the phone book.

And what I thought was going to be like an office ended up being his house.

I talked to his wife for 45 minutes, and he gets on the phone, and one of the first things he says to me, and I consider it a gift and a privilege of what I've gotten to do over the years of forming a friendship with Dick.

We start chatting, and I.

We're gonna do the interview.

And he says, you sure you want to talk to me?

Like, you sure?

And I was like, don't.

In my mind, don't you know who you are?

But that sense of humility that they have is something that you talk about in the book.

They describe themselves as, we're not visible guys.

Love our songs.

Not us.

Not us.

Yep.

Looking at today, right in today's creator economy, where visibility is everything, right?

It's all about me.

It's all about my.

Not me, like, my Instagram.

What do you think they would make of that shift to where the people who are the songwriters, the people who are the composers, the Alan Menken, all of a sudden are the celebrities.

They are in the forefront.

They are on stages at D23 events.

Well, I think technology has allowed for the divide between public and private to really be worn down in many, many, and some interesting ways.

And so, you know, we live in a culture now where everyone has a YouTube channel.

So having a public presence does not necessarily mean celebrity in the way that it would have in the 1960s.

And this attitude, love our songs, not us.

You know, admire our songs, not us, fits in so well with the Disney studio ethos, where everything's under Walt Disney's name and the Sherman Brothers actually have some visibility.

There's promotion for the Sherman brothers at the Disney Studio, so they, along with a few animators, have some visibility for what they are doing.

But that attitude, we're going to focus on making this the best film that we can, not on making this the best vehicle to advance our careers as possible, I think, is a much better attitude for creating things that deeply connect to people, that, you know, create enjoyment and insight for them.

And I think that that sincere humility that he always had is part of what made just him so endearing to people, too.

It wasn't just, you know, there is not a video that was ever put up or put out by Disney that, you know, Richard's not at the piano in Walt's office, that people are just not weeping, not just because you love the music, but because you love the man as well.

Yeah.

The first time that I talked with Dick was actually at Disneyland, and it was this.

It was early 2000s.

It was a surreal experience.

It had been set up for me by the company.

It was a surreal experience for Me because over there, we were in fantasy land over there world.

With an earshot of the carousel.

At a certain point in this I realized, oh my God, tons of songs on the carousel are songs that he wrote and he's not saying anything about them at the moment.

It's just like part of this, this world where I'm living inside of Dick Sherman's bubble.

And you know, I was talking to him about the World's Fair and some other stuff and he was just so gracious and so enthusiastic and he could focus in on you and make you feel so special when you were talking to him.

He was, had such a great ability.

It had to have been one of those like you sort of go out of body for a second looking down at you talking to Dick Sherman in the middle of Disneyland.

Like what am I doing?

How did I possibly get here?

Oh yeah.

There's so many moments where two things I wish I could go back and communicate to my 10 year old self is like, hey, things are going to be way better.

Hang on there for a little bit, things are going to be okay.

This is all going to turn out okay in the end.

And I also wish I could go back and communicate with my teenage self.

It's like you should have invested in a tape recorder.

So I grew up in Goleta, which is a suburb of Santa Barbara.

And in junior high I used to ride my little huffy 10 speed to junior high every day.

And on Carlo Drive in Goleta I used to pass by Carl Bark's house every day.

And I knew he lived there.

And you know, a little more adventurous 12 or 13 year old me with her tape recorder would have been really useful back then.

You know, I said hi to him a couple times, but it's like, hey, can I come in and like talk about your whole life?

That would have been a very useful thing to have done back then.

And then I worked on the other for year, for two years I worked on the other side of the wall from Fess Parker.

And so that would have been like another point where like, you know, like hey, you know, 18 year old Todd could have like been a little more conscientious about taping some of this.

Yeah, but we, you know, we don't know.

And it's.

But it's those moments that we do get to have that we share or carry with a very quick story.

Again, this is not about me, but just to go back and, and Richard, both Richard and his wife.

Right.

Just the nicest people on the planet that they Were.

He was our guest on a group cruise we did back in 2012.

We were able to arrange, you know, he gave a private concert just for us in the Walt Disney Theater.

And it's.

It was, you know, a top one or two moment I've ever had as a result of this.

And at dinner, he sat at our table, and my kids were really young then, and we're finishing up dinner, and he says, hey, would it be okay if we took your kids over to the theater?

We want to go and see the show.

So I get my nap and start, you know, wiping my mouth.

I said, yeah, yeah, come on, let's go.

And I cry.

Every time I tell the story, he puts his hand on my shoulder.

He goes, no, no, no.

You finish.

You have dessert.

Is it okay if we take your kids?

And I was.

You know, I don't think I ever let my parents take my kids at this point.

And I said, sure.

And I have this vision, this image burned into my mind's eye of Richard and his wife holding my two kids by their hands with.

Walking them to the Walt Disney Theater to hear music performed that he wrote.

And I'm just like, I am the luckiest person.

And it was my.

My daughter's birthday is November 18th.

We.

It took a lot of planning to make sure it was on Mickey Mouse's birthday.

We had a little party for her there, and he sang her happy birthday.

And I have a picture of him.

She's showing him this little red, pink, fuzzy autograph book they have.

And he's just watching her like it's the most interesting thing in the world.

I remember picking her up and hugging her and tears, just.

And I said, you better remember this.

For the rest of your life.

And she does, right?

But it goes to the.

I loved and love being able to sort of share.

It's why I tell these stories, the human side of these people, in the best possible light to that point.

You know, when you see things like we hear the stories and you see saving Mr. Banks, you know, that Pl.

Traverse may have been a little challenging to work with.

And in the movie and in your book, you talk about how she would interrupt Dick, like, mid song and be like, let me show you what these characters are supposed to do.

Let me show you what they're supposed to say.

Was there ever, like, knowing those stories and hearing those stories?

Was there ever a moment where you felt that Walt and.

Or the Shermans, maybe, even though they fought over the details, may have genuinely admired and appreciated that kind of input?

The Shermans are very young at this point and they've recently put on salary at the Disney Studio before that.

They're working project to project.

I think they're just trying to make this go as, as well as they can.

I think Walt during this.

One of the things that I admire about Walt is how manipulative he is with P.L.

travers.

Like Walt, I believe, has a good enough self knowledge to know that he's a person who's used to getting his way and so is Pamela Travers.

And if they are both in the room for days, this is going to end poorly.

And so he comes up with this elaborate excuse, yeah, I'm gonna go to Palm Springs.

But I think that's mostly so that he can't butt heads with her.

He's there when she arrives.

And the other really great manipulative thing that, that he does is I think he knows that PL Travers is probably not going to like Disneyland very much, but he invites her to go down on Easter Sunday.

And I believe it's specifically for something that they don't.

We don't do this anymore at Disneyland.

This hasn't happened in decades.

But on Easter, they used to have a turn of the century parade.

Ward Kimball, we were talking about Ward earlier, would bring his car club down with their turn of the century automobiles.

They would have girls with dolls in turn of the century perambulators, little prams going down there.

These are not cast members, these are not Disney employees, just civic groups that would come in.

This was a lot of early Disneyland parades, were civic groups that would come in.

Civic groups would come in and dress in their turn of the century outfits.

And that would be in their Easter bus.

And that would be the Easter parade.

I think what Walt's trying to do is like, hey, come see my park come down.

Let's say at noon.

The parade is at 2, I believe.

And I think he knows that they'll get there a little bit late, but they'll be at the front of the park while the parade's going on.

And he's trying to convince P.L.

travers is one of her many concerns is that Walt's going to turn this into a fantasy that looks like other Disney animated films.

And it's not going to be a serious historical period piece.

And I think what he's inviting her to see is like, hey, look.

Yeah, we do things like Sleeping Beauty that are animated, but hey, here's this parade in which we have a really good sense of art direction about how turn of the century works, which is when Mary Poppins is set overseas, admittedly, but during that period in an area that's arranged visually to be kind of like a period movie set, Main Street.

And so I think he's trying to kind of subtly influence her.

It's like, look, this is not how you see Disney, but these are possibilities that we have here already.

We can do this.

And that's some of the great stuff that you pull out.

And stories we haven't sort of heard before to that depth about those details and those conversation.

And, you know, we understand just from hearing the stories that, you know, she.

Details matter.

Right.

And she fought a lot over those details, including some of the linguistic ones.

Right.

It shouldn't be let's go fly a kite.

No, the proper thing is let's go and fly a kite, and I am going to die on that hill.

Like, what are those little battles which maybe have sometimes turned into big battles?

What do you think they reveal about her?

And is it her wanting to just win?

Is it a clash of British and American sensibilities and speech?

Or is it just about how much she genuinely cared about every single minute detail?

I think there's some of that.

About how much she cares about every single minute detail.

I don't think that Pamela Trevors has a large business or social support system.

She moves.

She has a home in England, but she spends a lot of time in America.

She comes to America during World War II.

She spends time overseas.

She travels quite a bit.

She seems to have these tangential business relationships with her American publisher, with an agent, with her British publisher, with a lawyer.

But there doesn't seem to be a strong support system there for her.

And I think as a reactionary mechanism, she had become very controlling of her own intellectual property as a way of protecting it.

But also, I think that by the time we're up to 1964, I think that was more kind of a habitual thing for her than something that was necessary.

Like, some of her suggestions are just crazy.

Like, we don't want any red in the picture.

There's no red in London.

The only song I hear for Mary Poppins is Green Sleeves is like, wait, that's like hundreds of years old.

I mean, you at least have music here that relates to the period, and you want to put in what.

So there's just kind of these crazy suggestions.

But I think this is a defense mechanism that had been useful probably in the 1940s, but because there's not a lot of people with close connections with her, it had just kind of expanded over time.

Is My take on this to the point where there is some overprotectiveness that's happening in the 1960s.

But in that, there's some genuine concerns that I understand with her.

She's specifically concerned that after the film's made, it's going to be Walt Disney's Mary Poppins and not Pamela Travers Mary Poppins.

And I get that.

Like, that that would be significant for an author, especially for an author that's created multiple books on the same character.

That was her primary public identity.

And so that's big.

So I get that she's concerned about that.

But, yeah, some of this, I think, is overprotection.

By the time we get to the 1960s.

And Walt's smart to say, like, hey, here are some much younger people.

You can tell them what to do.

But also, everyone understands that Don degradi, Bob and Dick, they don't have any ability to contractually bind the Disney company into doing anything, whereas Walt Disney would have had that ability.

So given that she seemed to object to nearly every creative choice that was made, do you think the film ultimately works because of or in spite of her involvement?

I don't think many of her suggestions taken into the film at all.

There are some things that Walt's already interested in doing that he presents as things that he's giving in on.

Like, yes, we will have the turn of the century setting as opposed to the Depression era, when it's set in the books.

And, yes, we'll primarily have a British cast, not an all British cast, but close.

There's only a few exceptions to the all British cast.

So there's some things that he kind of gives in on, but I think those are things that he was planning or very open to doing otherwise.

So there's this kind of faux negotiation.

The Poppins books are declining in popularity in the 1960s.

These are the primary source of PL Travers income.

And so she needs a movie to be made.

She was paid some money to offer screen treatment, some ideas for how to translate her stories into a screen property.

They are short stories.

There's not a unified plot in any of the books.

And so these are stories that parents can read their kids, like one a night until you get through the whole book.

They're those types of stories.

And so she needs some way to kind of leverage her income up in the 1960s.

And so I think that, more than anything else, is the reason why she relinquishes and finally decides that this movie can go forward.

She becomes very wealthy because of this, and her Books reach a far larger number of people because of this.

But also, there's a decrease in the public's understanding of PL Travers relationship to Mary Poppins and an increase and the perception that Walt Disney has a stronger relation to Mary Poppins moving forward.

One thing that's great about your book is as much as it is about the movie, it's about the people.

Right.

We've talked about Sherman Brothers, we talked about Peter Travis.

We cannot have this conversation without, you know, obviously, Dick Van Dyke, and I think even more so Julie Andrews and her role in this.

Again, one of the great moments that I've ever had is being able to, you know, have a conversation with Julie.

Like, this is the one I was able to show my mom.

And she knew exactly who I was talking to.

She didn't know who Dick Sherman is, but she knew who Julie Andrews was.

So that, for me, was like a big moment.

Based on what you know and conversations that you've had.

What do you think it was like for her stepping into this role that, as we said earlier, is sort of carrying the weight of this very, very big gamble that Disney has taken on it.

Yeah.

So she gives Walt all kinds of opportunities not to move forward with her.

And she's repeatedly surprised that Walt wants to work with her.

So Walt comes out to New York and he's manipulated into seeing Camelot so that he can see Julie Andrews.

Everyone else on the production team already thought that Julie Andrews was a good pick for Mary Poppins, but they need to convince Walt.

And so after seeing her, he makes an offer to both her and to her husband, Tony Walton, who's a set and costume designer to work on the film.

And Julie Andrews then explains afterwards that she's pregnant, and she assumes that this is going to be the end of it.

And Walt says, well, we'll just wait until you're ready to be in the movie and we can move forward then.

This probably very helpfully pushes the production back by about a year, maybe a little bit more than that, where things can kind of incubate and marinate and expand a little bit more.

And so that.

That becomes very useful.

But from Julie Andrews perspective, she's interested in moving into Hollywood.

She'd been in a previous Broadway play that was then being adapted by Warner Brothers to go to the screen, but she was not picked up to be in the screen version of it.

But here's this opportunity for her, and it's her opportunity to show some people over at Warner Brothers that she can do this type of work very well, but it's also a little bit disorienting for her.

She talks in a number of interviews about how this was the first time.

So when you record a Broadway soundtrack, you've rehearsed it for months and you've performed it in front of the audience.

And you know where the sweet spots are.

You know where the audience is going to react and how they're going to react most every night.

And that's reliable.

And you bring all that information into the recording booth with you.

You know how the listeners are going to hear this.

For Mary Poppins, she had to take some guesses about how to interpret this, and that was a hurdle that she needed to get over.

But this is also.

So I like to think of this book.

I like what you said about it.

That was very kind.

This is a book about making Mary Poppins, but it's beyond that.

A book about how Mary Poppins transforms the lives of the people who made it.

And so this is the moment where Julie Andrews career changes irrevocably after this.

She works on a film that has no music in it, and she also does Sound of Music, which has a lot of music in it.

But she moves from mostly a stage personality to a screen personality where she's able to handle dramatic roles and musical roles, which really expands out her career in interesting ways.

Yeah.

And it obviously was a transformative film, not just for the careers of some of the people who were in it, but I think for the Disney Company, too.

And I was thinking to videos and pictures I've seen of the premiere.

And there's dancers dressed as penguins, there's chimney sweeps, and there's Snow White.

Is there Snow White characters are there greeting Walt and Lillian?

And I'm like, is this sort of the passing of the torch, sort of metaphorically, of going from animation to the future, being not just.

Not animation, but live action and more importantly, musicals?

Yeah.

So, absolutely, this is the passing.

This is that premier at Gramen Chinese Theater, where all of key characters from the past hooks there, sleeping beauties, snow whites there, the dwarves are there, Mickey's there.

This is Walt's past welcoming in this new type of film into the Disney pantheon.

Walt had tried to make a film like this before with Babes in Toyland.

It wasn't nearly as successful for a number of reasons that we explore in the book, but I think Walt knows that this is the point where he had made a couple of runs towards doing something like this, but this was the one that worked out, and he was going to play this premiere, very large, much in the way that he had done with Snow white back in 1937.

And I don't want to spoil too much about the book because it's.

It's a fascinating read.

And again, you share so many stories that we've just never heard before.

And you are.

You're such an incredible.

Not just storyteller, but researcher.

What for?

You know, because going in, you probably said, I know a lot about this film already.

I know what was one of the biggest surprises from an author's perspective that you uncovered that maybe you didn't expect to find.

So, okay, so maybe a couple things.

I'd seen the film many times, but when I started watching it, like, over and over again to write the book, I was really surprised by some of the camera decisions.

The director here wants to keep the camera On David Tomlinson, Mr. Banks, as much as possible, even when other people are speaking.

I was like, oh, yeah.

So here we are.

We're.

Visually, this is so David Tomlinson's character.

Mr. Banks is also a character without a lot of deep self knowledge through most of the film.

And so he can't articulate his stresses and how he's changing through the film.

And so how the film compensates for this is the camera stays on him in really long shots while other people are talking, other people are singing.

It's on David Tomlinson.

So that his gestures and facial expressions are the way that the audience gets to see kind of sequence by sequence, how the transformation for him is moving through the story.

And so I thought that was.

So next time you watch Mary Poppins, just watch the shots of David Tomlinson.

Brilliant.

Yeah.

Dick Van Dyke is singing.

Camera's on David Tomlinson.

Dick Van dyke is telling Mr. Banks how poor a job he's doing as a parent, that kids are only young for a little bit of time.

We aren't watching Dick sing, which would be the natural camera position here.

We're watching how Mr. Banks is absorbing this, and that happens all through the film.

So I thought that was a great way to watch the film.

If you haven't seen in a while, watch the visual and watch the visuals of Mr. Banks and also appreciate what a fabulous job David Tomlinson does in this role in terms of carrying the main story mostly through actions and facial reactions.

The other story that I didn't know before I started in on this was that Glynis Johns was under the impression that the studio was interviewing her to be Mary Poppins and not to be Mrs. Banks.

And so, yeah, so I Thought that was a fabulous story that I hadn't known before, where she comes in and has lunch with everybody over in the choral room at the studio.

And she believes that she's there because Walt is considering her as the lead role in Mary Poppins.

Apparently, the communication to her was they were considering her for the film Mary Poppins, and she had made the leap that she was going to be the lead and a much younger character in the film.

And so I think that was pretty uncomfortable.

At a certain point in this conversation, everyone at the table simply just kind of looks to Walt as if to say, well, this is your company.

You need to handle this problem right now.

No one else is going to clean this one up.

It made me think, like, you probably.

You read those stories, you hear those stories, you're like, God, I'd give anything to be a fly on the wall in that room.

What moment?

Right, what moment?

If you could pick one, like, if you could be in the room just to sort of watch that moment happen, what do you think it would be?

Oh, if I could be in the room to watch, you know, I'd actually think I'd be in the room.

The first time that the Sherman Brothers go up to meet Walt in the studio, they had not been to the studio before this.

We talked earlier about how the Sherman Brothers were struggling financially.

They had worked with the recording arm, the Disneyland Records, Buena Vista Records.

They'd worked with that arm of the studio.

And their contact there was a person named Jimmy Johnson.

They had mostly met Jimmie Johnson at outside studios.

So the studios at Disney are arranged for voice actors and for symphony groups to record soundtracks.

There's not a good studio there to record pop music.

So they mostly meet them at outside studios where they record the songs for Annette and other things.

And so it's their first time over there.

And when they're driving over there, they have 35 cents in their pockets between them.

And they see the kiosk, and they're unsure if they're going to have to pay to park.

And so they don't know what to do.

And so they instead park down the street and walk back over to Jimmy Johnson's office, which is ground floor.

It's not in the animation building.

It's right across the way from the animation building.

And then they find out that they're going to go up and meet Walt, and Bob wants to know Walt who.

And they've been asked to write a song for a movie called the Horsemasters.

And they have three versions of the song for the Horsemasters.

And Jimmie Johnson says, we're going to go over there and you're going to play these versions for Walt, and he can kind of make a decision.

And so they initially say they'll make him a demo.

And they say, no, we're going to do this today.

We're just going to go up there and play the 16 bars that you have of these songs for Walt.

They go up there and they meet Walt, and Walt has this moment of confusion.

There's a lot of people that he works with.

He's never met the Shermans before.

He thinks that they are here because they're going to be writing songs for a film that would later be called the Parent Trap.

At the moment, it had earlier titles.

Petticoats and Bluejeans was one of the only titles.

Susan and I was another title.

And so he starts talking to them about music for the Parent Trap.

And the Sherman Brothers, they're young, they're very confused.

They have no idea what's going on.

And so they just sit there for a long time and let Walt kind of go on about this movie with Haley Mills.

Also.

They have no idea who Hayley Mills is.

She'd been in Pollyanna and some overseas films at this point, but this wasn't ringing any bells for them.

And at a certain point, they have to interrupt him and say, well, we are here because we wrote songs for the Horse Masters and we thought that's what you wanted.

And then he gets a little bit upset and he has them play the songs and he picks one.

It's called Strumming Song.

It's in the picture.

But because of that misunderstanding that he explains this entire other picture to them at the end of the meeting, he says, well, we'll get you some scripts for this other thing and see if you can come up with some music for that as well.

If there hadn't been that misunderstanding, the Sherman brothers might have gone up and played their three versions of Struman's song, or at least, you know, a version, until they found one that Walt liked and that.

That might have been it.

But this set up a chain of sequences that then began to change their careers irrevocably.

And it was.

It was a mistake, you know, that happened.

I would have loved to seen that, because I'd love to see Dick and Bob up there very young, and they only own one suit a piece.

And the one suits they own dressed there, far more stiff and formal than most people at the studio.

Kind of like what their eyes are doing, how they're trying to communicate to each other and to Jimmy Johnson, like, what is happening here.

And then also get to hear Walt kind of riff on what he thinks.

This movie, this other movie about kids and parents not understanding each other.

Big theme in the 60s for the Disney Studio, how that's working here.

And this is taking place in Walt's office.

This is Walt's office.

Third floor of the animation building.

Yeah.

Which we now all can picture in our mind's eye.

Because we've seen photos or we've been there, thanks to D20, the archives, et cetera.

Right.

So you can walk in.

And there's the outer office where the two secretaries were.

And then there's an inner lounging area where there's seats and a piano.

And so they would have gone in there to play music for them.

And they would have left and gotten scripts on the way out.

And Jimmy Johnson, who works with Disneyland Records.

Thinks this is all gone fantastically.

Because what he's trying to do in his world is Disneyland Records is kind of like this strange offshoot at the Disney Company.

And he's trying to tie it more closely to its main product, which is film.

And he's like, we now have a connection between Disneyland Records for original music for this film.

And maybe for this other film.

So it's worth working really well for him.

So as you were talking, I love.

Again, I've never heard these stories before.

Which is what the book is all about.

It really is the stories that you've never heard.

The conversations that, you know, you wish you could have been a part of.

So when I said earlier what an incredible, you know, not just researcher you are, but raconteur and storyteller.

It made me start thinking about, for you, this process.

Right.

This.

You did not.

This book is not, you know, you didn't write this over a weekend.

Tell me a little bit about the research process for you.

You know, how much of this is done on your own?

How much access, if any, do you have to the archives and to some of those people so that you can.

Because this really is the definitive book to sort of how this film got made.

And again, it is as much about as what's put on the silver screen.

As is about the people.

Yeah.

So my research process is that I have here on the laptop.

A number of files that have different films or artists names on them.

And it's kind of like fill them in over time.

A lot of research for me is going to archives, going to individual collections.

Hopefully looking for something.

I'm Looking for, but often being surprised by things I find there that I didn't know would be there.

And so I keep really long outlines going for a lot of things.

So right now I've been working on a biography of sorts of Mary Blair.

And that was like the Sherman Brothers thing.

That was one of these, like, list and files, boxes of stuff.

I have these plastic storage boxes.

And so I'll.

That's kind of like a mental organization thing for me.

Things go in this box for the Sherman Brothers or these boxes for the Sherman, and so on.

And so when it gets to a certain point and I can kind of see in there, it's like, oh, yeah, I've got enough stuff to really write something here.

Like, I have enough information to kind of push this through into a space that people haven't seen before and to make some connections that I don't think I've been overtly made before.

Then I can really start outlining.

I usually work with really long outlines.

The outline for the Sherman Brothers, I think, was about 150 pages, where all of my quotes, including quotes from your fabulous interviews.

Those are things I went through all the interviews for the Shermans to arrange things out.

So much of the book would be from their perspective.

And then from that.

Once I have that done, I start.

Start drafting it.

You mentioned earlier about how Mary Poppins was not a screenplay based on this long novel, but a lot of sort of almost disconnected stories that were brought together.

And I think.

I think that's one of the things that I picked up about the way you put this together, how you constructed this book, because it almost.

It reads more like a story itself, not just history, which sort of mirrors the way Disney took these scattered chapters into a very cohesive narrative.

Yeah, well, I think that's generally what any biographer or nonfiction writer's essential job is, is to take large amounts of research and maybe also do some research beyond that to fill in gaps or to add depth in areas that.

That are important and then to arrange it ideally, in a way that's accessible and enjoyable for a reading audience.

And for me, beyond that, what I like to think in the best moments of my book, hopefully readers will feel like they're having a secondhand, vicarious sense of being in the room in some of those situations with the Sherman Brothers or with Walt or with Ward Kimball or other things like that.

It'll help put them in there.

So with that, I rely a lot on photographs.

I rely a lot on film that's taken to kind of figure out how all this worked visually as well.

Well, I think that's the beauty as you go through it and as you tell these stories, as you read the book.

Now, because we have context, because we've been to or seen photos of Walt's office, we've seen saving Mr. Banks, we can imagine in our mind's eye what these conversations look like.

And again, I can talk.

We have been talking for hours.

I would say I could talk to you for hours about this, but we could talk for hours because you don't just sort of talk and you sort of.

Again, I love the way you weave the narrative from very early on to the final preparations and the filming of it and the post production and the artwork from Peter Ellenshaw.

I mean, there's so much more depth that you go into and it really does sort of paint such a vivid picture of the processes and the challenges in a way that is not just about what we see on screen, but all the things that have to happen.

All these sometimes jigsaw puzzle pieces that don't look like they're going to connect and then somehow, you know, magically, Walt and the Sherman brothers and everybody involved is able to put them together.

Yeah, for me, like one of the.

It's always one of like the eye opening moments of working on a project is when I have all the stories, you know, all the interviews, all the things that were written kind of like arranged out the things that I think are essential in a timeline.

I can suddenly look at that as like, oh, this is happening almost at the same time as this.

So these two things are communicating with each other almost clearly.

Like, you can see things in that timeline that aren't necessarily picked up on elsewhere.

You can see where the connections are happening as, as the project moves forward.

Yeah, it's.

It's even against him.

I loved how you talk about in some of the later chapters about, you know, having to.

Again, this was something we know he sort of done it with like Alice comedies.

But how, you know, blending the choreography and the matte test and the looks of Cherry Tree Lane, how much preparation had to go into it even before they started rolling cameras.

Yeah, yeah, these are, this is a, this is a project for a very mature studio and a very mature filmmaker set of filmmakers.

This is not something that could have been handled earlier in Disney's career because it relies on so many different technologies and our artistic processes, which are groundbreaking at the time.

Right.

Again, a lot of that, that matte work and the, the Abi works, the sodium screen processes and things like that which had just never been done before.

The stop motion, which the studio had only recently started to experiment with.

They talked about that.

The existencio.

That's where it comes from the other day, the audio animatronics that are included in the film.

So there's a lot of things that come together in this that are relatively young for the studio as well.

Yeah.

But again, it comes back to people.

And I think there's so much that you share that really humanizes the experience.

Not just from the Sherman brothers and Travers, but even some of the.

The child actors and how not just wonderful and sometimes challenging and technically demanding.

Some of the scenes and things that they had to do were.

Yeah, yeah.

Karen Dotrice loses a tooth.

Well, I mean, you know, because she's young, they're just.

The baby teeth are falling out.

And so there's.

There's things with Working with young children actors that you don't prepare for and are surprising when they happen.

So she loses a tooth while they're filming the first sequence.

So they have to come up with a fake tooth very quickly, otherwise there's no visual continuity.

Her parents had worked with the rsc, a Royal Shakespeare Company in England.

And so she had had some vocal training for the song she's supposed to sing, asking for a new nanny.

And they had overseas, taught her to sing it with a operatic vibrato.

And so, yeah, the great stories that I had the opportunity to learn while working on the project.

And I think when you read the book and then go back and watch Mary Poppins again, you look at the film with such a deeper understanding.

And I think it's.

What I love about it is that almost.

It's less of a reflection of the time that it was made as almost.

It's still a story.

And the reason why I think it still has something urgent to say today in terms of lessons for kids and lessons for parents.

So what do you think makes this film specifically?

We use the word timeless a lot, but it is.

It's timeless in a way that especially other musicals aren't.

Yeah, it's.

It's timeless because I think it's commenting on things that we still struggle with today.

I've got kids, they just graduated from high school.

Happens fast, doesn't it?

It does happen fast.

Yes, it does.

But I'll.

You know, I'm gonna go home and.

Watch Mary Poppins and cry again about my.

About my kids being in college.

What year are they in college?

Just got sophomore and a senior, so.

I'll have two freshmen.

Sorry, Junior and your senior.

Oh, God, it is going too fast.

But you know, I do my best to kind of keep up with their interests and how their world works, but also I find like a lot of it overwhelming, like how much time that they can spend online and how they find emotional connections through screen mediated experience.

Experiences which would not be how I would most want to make those connections, but it, but it works for them.

I try to keep up as much as I can on their language, on their interest.

Dad, we don't say that anymore, right?

Yeah.

That was so two weeks ago.

Cool beans.

Yeah.

So I think that in a world where technology and culture changes deeply every 10 years, this is a movie about generational divides.

And if you look over like Western history or even history of America, if you were born in 1800 and in 1850, you would have things like power presses and steam engines, but the amount of change would be miniscule compared to a 50 year period during our lifetimes.

The technology that we grew up with in the 70s and 80s, almost all of it's entirely gone now.

None of it's there.

It's become fodder for late night comedians.

And so this idea of a changing world that creates a disconnection between parents and children because they live in two different realities, I think is very pertinent to us today.

And I think that's one of the reasons why this feels timeless, because it speaks to condition that we have now.

Certainly from a parent perspective, I'm not, you know, it's not hyperbole when I say that this film continues to have a profound impact on me because when I would sit in my office and my kids would come in and say, do you want to have a tea party?

Do you want to go, I'm going to start crying again?

Do you want to play ball?

Do you want to watch this thing?

You want to do whatever?

It's so easy for us to be like, no, no, I got to finish this thing.

And I thought of Mr. Banks and I.

And I think there's a ripple effect to it because when I either speak to entrepreneurs, where I speak to, you know, don't say no to your children.

Like, the work can wait.

You'll stay up a half hour later to finish what you have to do.

But don't say no to your children.

Because I think of, you know, Mr. Banks, regret, and the way the children view him.

And I learned a lot from Mary Poppins.

And to that end I learned a lot from your book, which gives me even a much deeper appreciation for the film, for the actors, for everything that it went in, and certainly a deeper appreciation for you.

I have.

I've appreciated you and the work that you've done.

Thank you very much.

Incredible respect for the.

The what you've put out over the years that have really enriched the lives of so many people who are Disney fans.

Helping to share stories.

We were talking earlier about, you know, Jim Corkus, that same thing, sharing these stories that we haven't heard before.

And without question, that is what this book does, man.

I have 9,000 other questions for you, but if.

If what do you want a reader.

What's the one thing you hope a reader takes away from the book?

Well, I hope the one thing the reader takes away from the book is exactly what you're saying, that.

That it doesn't end with the book, but it takes them back to the film to see it again, and then to feel deeper or, you know, maybe more satisfying or a broader connection with the film, to feel like they have a sense of what was behind this all.

The film was about personal change, particularly for Mr. Banks and to a lesser extent, for the Banks children in the movie.

But the story behind the film is about how this deeply changed the lives of all the people, all the key people who worked on it.

They had one life before the film, and they had a very different, different life after the film was over, including.

For Walt, which is why I'm assuming the title of the book is Making Mary Poppins.

The first name you put is the Sherman Brothers, then Walt Disney, and then the creation of the classic film.

Yeah, it had a different title when it was sent out to publishers, when my agent sent it out to publishers, and the publisher that bought it, Norton.

Norton, decided that Making Mary Poppins was going to communicate what the book was about far better than what I had put there, which maybe had, like, a little more literary bent and, like, transformation of the characters and stuff like that.

It's like, don't worry about Making Mary Poppins.

Everyone understands.

I was like, okay, that's fine.

It is a fascinating read.

And again, I think it'll give anybody who reads it and then goes back to watch the film a much deeper, much greater appreciation.

So buy the book, read Making Mary Poppins, the Sherman Brothers, Walt Disney, and the creation of the classic film by Todd James Pierce.

Then go and watch Saving Mr. Banks, and then go and watch Mary Poppins again, not just alone, but if they're around, bring your parents, and if you have them, bring your children, because it is definitely a film that is appreciated.

More as time goes on.

Tom James Pierce, thank you so much for sharing these stories.

More importantly, for sharing your time today.

Thank you so much for having me on, Lou.

I appreciate it.

The journey that led me here really started back in 2003 when I wrote my very first Walt Disney World trivia book, which is one of the reasons why I love including a Disney Trivia Question of the Week almost every week on the show.

It's not just a fun way for you to hopefully learn something new, pay it forward and share it with a friend.

And more importantly, you can enter for a chance to win a Disney Prize package and this week's trivia contest is brought to you.

It's the final countdown by my favorite foodie event of the year, the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Food and Wine Classic.

It's happening this Friday and Saturday, November 14th and 15th, right in the heart of Walt Disney World.

It is an amazing night of incredible food, drinks, live music and Disney magic under the stars.

More importantly, Your single Pay1Price ticket includes, wait for it, unlimited I'm smiling food and beverages with dishes from award winning chefs and some of the incredible restaurants at the Swan and Dolphin like Michael Mina's Bourbon Steak, Todd English's Blue Zoo.

There's wine, beer, creative cocktails from around the world all on the beautiful causeway right in between the Swan and Dolphin Resort.

It really is one of the highlights of my year.

I cannot wait to go.

I will be there this Friday so if you're going to go, let me know.

I'd love to meet up.

We can grab some food together.

Tickets are on sale now.

You can get all the details over at Swan Dolphin food and wine classic.com and I hope to see you there this weekend.

Now before we get to this week's trivia question, let's go back review last week's and select our winner.

So I gave you an extra week to answer this Halloween themed trivia question because in Muppets Haunted Mansion, which is one of my favorite things that Disney has ever put on Disney, I asked you to tell me what is the name of the magician whose mysterious disappearance 100 years earlier set the entire story in motion and really inspired the haunting of the Muppet Haunted Mansion itself.

First, thanks to so many of you entered got this one correct.

Shared stories about you and your family gathering around the TV to watch Haunted Muppets Haunted Mansion every year.

And the answer of course is the great MacGuffin which is a really clever nod to the filmmaking turn MacGuffin which is often like it's an object or an event that drives the plot but isn't necessarily important itself.

It's almost like a red herring, but it's also like a wink, not just to movie buffs, but to really the entire story structure.

Because the Great MacGuffin's disappearance is what brings Gonzo and Pepe and the rest.

Of the gang into the Harder Mansion.

And then hilarity ensues.

Anyway, I took all the correct entries, randomly selected one, and last week you were playing for a WWO keychain, stickers pin and a mystery prize.

And last week's winner, the randomly selected, is Chris Shioda.

So Chris, congratulations.

I'll get your prize package out to you right away.

And if you played last week and didn't win, that's okay, because here's your next chance to enter in this week's not Walt Disney World, but Mary Poppins Trivia Challenge.

So this one is simple and straightforward because in Mary Poppins, again, arguably one of, if not very few, perfect movies.

Let me know if you agree or disagree.

What is the name of the bank where Mr. Banks works?

What's the name of the bank where Mr. Bank works?

You have until Sunday, November 16th at 11:59pm Eastern to go to www.radio.com click on the Week's podcast.

Use the form there.

And again this week you're going to play for a keychain, stickers, pin and a mystery prize.

Maybe one that I'll bring back from the Disney Destiny.

And speaking of which, stay tuned to my Instagram.

I'm going to have a Disney Destiny non podcast related, very easy to enter, huge prize package up for grabs this week.

So good luck on both and have fun.

Foreign.

That'S going to do it for this week's show.

Thank you again for taking the time to tune in.

This is every week.

Thanks to Todd Pierce for coming out to Walt Disney World and joining me.

If you want to watch the video of our conversation.

Not that there's any sort of grand things to watch, it's just two guys in the Polynesian talking about Mary Poppins.

You can find this and plenty of other videos on the WWRADO YouTube channel@YouTube.com WWradio I also have links in the show notes over@www.com to where you can pick up Todd's book.

And once again, thank you, thank you, thank you again for taking the time to tune in this week.

I hope you enjoyed our conversation.

Be sure to stay tuned to coverage from and about the Disney Destiny this week.

And again, this opportunity which I am so privileged to have and grateful for, does not happen without you.

So thank you very much for that gift.

I cannot wait to share that experience with with you as it happens over the next few days, and certainly on the podcast.

And I hope that even in a very small way, this show and the community that you have created brought you a little bit of magic in return.

If it did and you dig this week's show, please help spread the word.

And share it with a friend.

And as always, and I think even in the spirit of Mary Poppins, please remember to be kind, to choose the good, be the good.

Positivity has a ripple effect and I promise, promise you will feel better as a result of it.

Have an amazing day and even better tomorrow.

I love and appreciate you.

So until next time.

Thanks again.

See ya.

Hi everyone, it's Elizabeth from Massachusetts.

It's been a minute.

Few things, though.

Anyone who just came home, like myself from the Run Disney Wine and Dine Weekend, super big congrats to any and all the races that you ran.

It was such a fun and great weekend and the weather was beautiful.

Secondly, just finished listening to the most recent episode about spooky things to add to the parks and I would definitely pay for your Epcot idea, Lou.

I think that kind of reminds me of like the festival of holidays where you can go around and learn like different traditions from each of the countries.

And I would totally, like pay for that if I could also have a nice drink in hand.

And I'm kind of like walking around with the tour guide per se.

I think that'd be cute.

Or just even adding them to the countries as you walk around.

The one thing that I've always kind of thought would be like a cute little addition or like something fun for the guest experience is actually trick or treating at the resort.

So kind of like how there are Christmas trees during the holiday time that you can visit per hotel.

It'd be like so fun to have just like a trick or treat spot per hotel.

So, like, if you were there actually on the day or close enough, you know, there could be like a designated this is the trick or treat day or whatever.

Actually, I guess that doesn't matter.

Disney.

It would just be a Halloween.

Just need to be a certain day.

I just think it'd be fun for families and kids to, you know, kind of do while they're visiting.

Anyway, hope everyone's having a great day.

It is Tuesday today.

Halloween is this upcoming Friday.

So happy Halloween to everyone and make it a great week.

Bye.

Well, it sounds pretty good.

In fact, that's just the right spirit.