"I just wish that Lawson had had the chance to talk with author Brian Sibley before she finally finished writing "Mary Poppins, She Wrote." Brian has some absolute amazing stories to tell about the "Mary Poppins" sequel that he & Travers worked on together back in the mid-1980s. Just wait 'til you hear who Disney execs wanted to cast as Barney, Bert's brother in this never-produced motion picture"

If Valerie Larson didn't talk to Brian Sibley, and this info isn't in the book, how will we ever know who Disney execs wanted to cast as Barney?  We'll never know...  :-(

blackcauldron85: Lookie here (if you dare) http://briansibleysblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/hellzapoppins.html

Thanks, Jarvarama!  Wow...that's crazy...But why couldn't they have brought Bert back?  I love him and Mary!

RE:  Barney the Ice Cream Man

Not to spoil it for anybody, but I just about laughed my self to death on that one.

Holy god that's terrible.  "He's part of the family now."  It's one of those stories that's too bizarre to be made up - thanks for the link, Jim, that let us hear it from  apparently the only sane one at that meeting.  To blackcauldron - I think that Julie Andrews in the 80's could have still looked like Mary Poppins had only been gone for a few months, but by that time Van Dyke was really showing his age and could not have.  That's my guess anyway.

OMFG, are you kidding me?! What executive in their right mind would have suggested HIM?!

I wonder if she tried to talk to Brian Sibley but he declined her request for an interview? I assume that, if he was such a good friend to P.L. Travers, he would have respected her incessant desire for privacy.

Back when "Captain EO" was Paul McCartney's Pal and the Friend of Children Everywhere, every studio wanted to be the one to give him his post-"Wiz" movie debut--Spielberg was even reportedly toying with a project for him around the same time. (Many of the producers likely reconsidered his acting after "Moonwalker: the Movie", and by that point in his carer, no one could hire him for anything.)  :)
Disney still had "Comes Back" on their boards up until the early 90's-Eisner era (back when they honestly believed they couldn't DO any sequels except for Rescuers and Fantasia, because all their stories were wrapped up)--
Although Barney the Ice Cream Man was long gone, and they were back to a nice franchiseable Mary and Bert, with Sarah Brightman fresh out of "Phantom" on stage and Robert Lindsay just getting musical-Cockney raves for "Me & My Girl".  (Unfortunately, Lindsay's US movie career never got past "Bert Rigby, You're A Fool".)

Another interesting read, btw, is Sheila Greenwald's children's book "Mariah Delany's Author of the Month Club", where our independent 10-yo. heroine wants to meet all her favorite local authors in person...Unfortunately, one of her favorite books is a fictionalized Poppins, and one of the authors is a very, very, VERY thinly disguised real-life PL. Travers--Can you say "childhood trauma"?  :)

Just read the story on Brian's site.  That would have been quite a pair to put together.  That exec had to be out of his mind!!!!!!

Personally I think they could have still hired Dick.
In 1988 Dick Van Dyke had just finished filming a Tv Special about the 20th anniversary of Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey's Clown College.
Where not only did he dance and sing, in the but did some real slapstick (falls, etc.)
He definitely wasn't to old to do all that for a TV special, I wonder what he could have done for a real film.

PingBack from http://chaespot.com/star/2006/11/16/11142006-buddytv-spoilerfix-tvj-session-by-isabelle/

My question is...why did P.L. want to shy away from any romantic hints between Mary and Bert? Especially when *she herself*, in the first book, built up those hints? (Mary's uncharacteristic shyness when she and Bert first see each other again, for example, and the line "Don't you know everyone's got a Fairyland of their own?")

Also...it's de facto for people to bring up the differences between the MP books and the movie and the "P.L. Travers hated the movie" meme when they want to blast OMG TEH EEEBIL Disney. But at least these anecdotes show that Travers' feelings weren't so clear-cut. And I think that the books--very episodic in nature--would NEVER have made a good movie without changes and that, like Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy, the Disney movie was the best possible *film version* that could have been made.

There are those who thought P.L. sounded like a cool person for "not suffering fools gladly." But I sometimes got the impression that her definition of "fools" was "anyone who is not Pamela Lyndon Travers." Maybe I ought to give the bio a read.