Mary Poppins - John C. Kirk
Jan. 25th, 2009
01:20 pm - Mary Poppins
The BBC posted an article on Friday: Mary Poppins - a tale for our times. According to that: "Mr Banks, if I may remind you, was suspended from his banking job because he upset the owners by showing the door to a man who had a too-clever scheme to make millions."
That's not the way I remember it. As I recall, he was fired because his son caused a run on the bank; he couldn't get his tuppence back (to feed the birds), so all the other customers demanded to withdraw their savings, and the bank didn't have enough cash in the building to satisfy everyone. I think that's also a lesson which applies to modern times, i.e. irresponsible journalists could cause a bank to collapse if they urge everyone to pull out their money before it's too late, but it's quite different to what the BBC article mentions.
I've only seen the film, not the stage version, so has it been changed as it was adapted? If it has been changed, that's fair enough, but then it's not too surprising that the "period piece fable set a hundred years ago is grimly relevant to our troubled times", since this version was in fact written in modern times. Or is my memory just failing me altogether?
The plot point mentioned in the article is certainly present in the musical, although you're right that it's not in the film. I couldn't find detailed enough synopses of the books to ascertain whether either of the plot points are derived from the books, but I would think that the musical plot is as likely to be "original" as the film (including the possibility that neither or both are present in the books).