I too found the sour Mary a shock after Disney's sweet Mary, but somehow I was able to put that aside and enjoy the books anyhow. The stories that they tell are more interesting than the ones in the movie and stuck in my head just as much or more than the movie (the zoo! the Pleiades! the gingerbread shop! Michael's bad day!), which is saying a lot because I LOVED the movie and the songs in it.
What I thought was especially shameful, though I'm sure I didn't think of this until I was a teenager, was that Disney changed the whole focus of the story to be about Mr. Banks and his conversion from a proper British banker to a feel-good Americanized father. It's true that the original books don't have a strong story arc and are mostly a collection of separate incidents, so they needed something to tie them together. But ugh. Travers was right to be furious.
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Date: 2013-12-17 05:53 pm (UTC)What I thought was especially shameful, though I'm sure I didn't think of this until I was a teenager, was that Disney changed the whole focus of the story to be about Mr. Banks and his conversion from a proper British banker to a feel-good Americanized father. It's true that the original books don't have a strong story arc and are mostly a collection of separate incidents, so they needed something to tie them together. But ugh. Travers was right to be furious.