Mary Poppins/YMMV

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• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • There are also who think Mary Poppins is an irresponsible, dangerous drunk. She supernaturally disposes of her competition for the job, then takes her charges to play with a homeless man. After giving them cough medicine. That tastes like rum to her.
  • Some people think she gives off a cold and dismissive feeling and would not actually be very successful with real children, like she was in the movie, in real life.
  • Given how dismissive she is of everyone she meets, except when they fall about praising her, Mary Poppins is some kind of high-functioning sociopath.
  • Time Lady of Gallifrey. Seriously, she pulls a six-foot lamp out of her bag, right there in the film.
  • Some people insist that Burt is actually a Crazy Homeless Person.
• Canon Sue: It wouldn't be surprising if Mary Poppins's middle name was Sue.
  • Further evidence that Tropes Are Not Bad.
  • She even gets a song about it in the stage musical. She's Practically Perfect, after all.
  • She vaguely borders on a Parody Sue, in that while she's (as is well-known) practically perfect in every way, very few of the truly positive developments in the movie are directly her doing. While she is the catalyst for change, very little of it comes directly from her... for example, Mr. Banks' changed attitude towards his children largely comes from experiences that he had intended to have with them anyway (taking them to the bank to open their account) and his conversation with Bert (who had been hired as a sweep independent of Mary). Mary gives a nudge here or there, but her influence is far more subtle and less direct than many examples of the Sue breed.
• Ear Worm: Practically every song.
  • Chim chiminey chim chiminey chim chim cheree, a sweep is as lucky as lucky can be! Chim chiminey chim chiminey chim chim cheroo...
  • Just...A... Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, the medicine go dow-own, the medicine go down! Just a spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down, in the most de liiiiiiiight-fullllll waaaaaaaay!
  • Feed the birds, tuppence a bag. Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag! Feed the birds, that's what she cries, while overhead her birds fill the skies!
    • Famously, this song was a favorite of Walt Disney. Whenever he visited the Sherman brothers, he would say "play it". They would already know he meant "Feed the Birds" and play it for him. Even at his funeral.
  • Let's! Go! Fly a kite! Up! To! The highest height! Let's! Go! Fly a kite, and send! It! Soaring!
  • Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious. If you say it loud enough, you'll always sound precocious....
  • I love to laugh! Loud and long and clear! I love to laugh! It's getting worse every year...
  • Step in time! Step in time! Step in time! Step in time! Never need a reason, never need a rhyme! Step in time! You step in time!
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Miss Andrew, the anti-Poppins, seems to be this in the stage version.
• Narm Charm: Everyone knows how painful Dick van Dyke's faux Cockney accent is in the film, but most are willing to forgive Dick for it anyway.
• Purity Sue: A rare positive example, helped by Andrews's Academy Award winning performance, making Mary come across as a three dimensional character.
• So Bad It's Good: Not the movie itself, mind. But rather, Dick Van Dyke's accent.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Particularly in the initial pressings of the books, where the chapter "Bad Tuesday" has stereotyped depictions of Alaskan Native, Chinese, Indigenous American, and tropical "Negroes", the latter of which fall victim to those racist Southern-style tropes of watermelons and slave patois; this led to the original book being banned from the San Francisco Public Library system in 1980, though P. L. Travers did later amend the offending chapter twice, once in 1961 with the removal of offensive words and lines of stereotypical portrayals, and another in 1981 with the stereotyped ethnic portrayals replaced with animals instead. To be completely fair, Travers did pay a visit to Indigenous American reservations at some point in her career so she was at least somewhat aware of their culture, but the values at the time amounted to the rather prejudiced portrayals of other cultures in "Bad Tuesday".
  • The 1964 film garnered some minor controversy in 2024 when the BBFC re-rated it from U (Universal) to Parental Guidance due to the use of the (archaic) ethnic slur "Hottentot" in reference to the Khoekhoe people of South Africa, which the film board apparently perceived as more akin to the similarly offensive term "gypsy" for Romani people or perhaps the n-word for that matter.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: While considered quaint by today's standards, Mary Poppins is noted for being one of the most visually-stunning films of the time. Of particular note was its use of the sodium vapor process, whereby a powerful light produces a shade with a characteristic wavelength near 589 nm. Light from the sodium lamp is cast onto a white background, producing a specific shade which could be split onto a special prism allowing for a more accurate and cleanly isolated matte. This accounts for why the animated park sequence lacked the ugly fringing common with blue and/or green screen techniques (which required a lot of manual tweaking to fix in post-production; ironically enough, the 2018 sequel used a lot of blue and green screen though to be fair visual effects technology has advanced by that time) and allowed for complex elements such as the see-through veil in Mary's fancy dress to show up seamlessly as well as the blue stripes in Bert's suit.
  • Lost Technology: The process depended on a very special cubical prism especially fabricated for this purpose, which was then fitted into a custom-built camera that exposed two reels of film at the same time. Only three of these prisms were ever made -- and no one knows what happened to them in the years since they were last used. Fortunately, Technology Marches On, and as of the early 2020s it is now possible to recreate the process with off-the-shelf parts.
• What Do You Mean It's Not Didactic?: Some critics and academics have argued that the film encapsulates the societal shift of its time, with Mr. Banks representing the passing of the stuffy 1950s and Mary Poppins representing the arrival of the carefree 1960s.
  • In the musical, the contrast between generations is represented in the story, with George Banks, Miss Andrew, and most of the adults representing the older up-tight Victorian era while Mary, Bert, Mrs. Corry, Northbrook and a few others represent the much looser Edwardian era.