Giving Up Mary Poppins to Save Mr. Banks

Last year I went to see saving Mr. Banks. The story revolves around Walt Disney’s attempt to convince the author P.L. Travers to sell him the film rights to her book Mary Poppins.  It wasn’t until later that it occurred to me that I had just seen a big budget studio movie that was about intellectual property rights. I thought it was a nice contrast to the issues that we studied in our big thinkers class.  In Saving Mr. Banks you have the classic intellectual property rights situation where a company wants to buy the rights from an individual. It is very clear cut; Disney can’t make the movie unless Travers sells the rights. Those were the good old days because the issue was easy to understand. No gray area there. Once Disney gets the rights, he can put in dancing penguins if he wants and Travers just has to let go.  

Today we have just the opposite. Disney tries to stop millions of people from using their intellectual property. Since individuals are using Disney material for many different means, usually not to make money, it’s harder to find out when people are doing something illegal. They are also trying to keep control of something that they basically can never completely control. Disney can try to scare most people into following their rules, but they cannot possibly stop them all from using their creations. Had Walt Disney used Mary Poppins without permission then it would have been easy for P.L. Travers to know who to sue. For the  Disney company,  it’s more like being a traffic cop, deciding who to go after.

The fact that a Hollywood movie was made about obtaining movie rights shows how mainstream this issue is now.  Saving Mr. Banks also examines the emotional side of property rights. From the beginning it is clear that P.L. Travers does not want to sell and only considers it because she is broke. The movie spends a lot of time covering Traver’s childhood so that you understand why she is so attached to her work. Most of the time I tend to think of intellectual property rights as being about the money, but it is also about the artist’s emotion and connection to their work. Even if you get paid it can be difficult to see someone take your work and represent it in another way.  I’m not a big fan of Mary Poppins, but most of the people in the theatre were 10 or more years older than I am and many of them hummed along to the tunes. For them what Walt Disney did was magical, for Travers, it was changing the meaning of her work.  

You can see P.L Travers struggle with giving up the rights to Mary Poppins in trailer embedded below.