https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/movies/mary-poppins-returns-blackface.html
In my wildest imaginings, I don’t think I would have ‘gone there’…The Chimney Sweeps’ dance was one of my favorite scenes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/movies/mary-poppins-returns-blackface.html
In my wildest imaginings, I don’t think I would have ‘gone there’…The Chimney Sweeps’ dance was one of my favorite scenes.
It would never have crossed my mind that this was meant to represent anything other than the fact that chimney sweep were covered in soot.
It was soot. The lyric is “Though I spends me time in the ashes and smoke
In this 'ole wide world there’s no 'appier bloke.”
Political correctness run amok. Lin-Manuel Miranda is Puerto Rican. He grew up in NYC and one of the teachers who took a special interest in him early on was African-American. There is no universe in which he would intentionally do something racist.
But comically, Dick Van Dyke was forever apologizing for his bad cockney accent, even though none of the English actors had a problem with it.
Read the article before commenting. Pollack-Pelzner acknowledges that the soot was soot from sweeping chimneys. He claims, however, that “Travers’s novels … associate chimney sweeps’ blackened faces with racial caricature,” as people in her novels see or affect to see blackfaced people as black Africans and inferior.
A lot of the associations Pollack-Pelzner makes seem strained, to say the least. In the song “A Cover Is Not the Book” in the new Mary Poppins, we learn of a Lady Hyacinth Macaw who retired to a beach and wore almost nothing. And this is supposed to be bad because an early published version of a Mary Poppins book had a black character who had a “pickaninny baby” and used minstrel dialog, and in a later version of the book this offensive character was replaced by a hyacinth macaw, a kind of bird. Um, what?
People are looking for reasons to be offended these days.
Scary state of things in the US …Europe is not hyper sensitive like this.
I got so bored reading that NYT article that I literally fell asleep half way through. Virtue signaling is the new Ambien.
I loved Mary Poppins bc, as a kid, I was always amazed when the characters entered into the animated world (also in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, another favorite Disney movie of mine). Then, when I saw Disney’s movie, Saving Mr. Banks, Mary Poppins became even more special to me as it poignantly detailed how the author of MP, Pamela Travers, finally allowed Mr. Disney to make the film, with much input and oversight by her bc this was a very personal story for her. That movie made me fall in love with MP even more! I made DH watch SMB with us and even he got a bit choked up during certain scenes. SMH at the new york times article …
@“Cardinal Fang” A lot of the associations Pollack-Pelzner makes seem strained, to say the least."
@emptynesteryet “People are looking for reasons to be offended these days.”
Bingo! So sad.