It will come as no surprise to anyone that movies often significantly depart from the books upon which they are based.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they are a diminished form of the story; simply different.
Some authors, however such as J. D. Salinger and Roald Dahl, most certainly thought the movie adaptations of their books were lesser works, and one in particular, P. K. Travers, who wrote Mary Poppins, expressed her displeasure in sternly vociferous terms, a version of which, a highly fictionalised version say some, was featured in Disney’s Saving Mr Banks.
Travers’ Mary Poppins was a good deal different to her movie counterpart, earthier, sterner and more apt to say what was what as Kathryn Hughes noted in her Guardian article What Saving Mr Banks tells us about the original Mary Poppins:
“…as Travers’s text makes clear, Mary Poppins is no beauty. She has squinty eyes and big feet and regularly attracts the comment from the other characters that she is “not much to look at”. Nor does the original Mary Poppins sound anything like the carefully modulated Julie Andrews. Travers gives her the accent and vocabulary of a real London nanny: cockney base notes overlaid with a strangled gentility. So she says things like “I’ll have you know that my uncle is a sober, honest, hard-working man!” and punctuates her pronouncements with “a superior sniff.”
I’d like to think that this wholly more grounded version of Mary Poppins – for the record, I am a fan of both, delighting in both Travers’ literary creation and her all-dancing, all-singing Disney incarnation – is the inspiration for a Death metal version of one of the best known songs from the film, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, by Andy Rehfeldt.
Certainly the song, which is as joyfully loud and thunderous and just plain seditiously wonderful as you might hope for, and features vocals by Sera Hatchett of Mercy Brown and Thomas Hinds, arrangements by music producer Grant Cornish and instrument playing by Andy Rehfeldt, channels just the kind of vibe of which the book version of Mary Poppins might have wholly approved.
As long as they stopped their glorious noise before bedtime, of course.
(source: Laughing Squid)
And for comparison here is the original scene from Mary Poppins, starring the incomparable Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke …