In a 2019 opinion piece by way of The New York Instances, creator Daniel Pollack-Pelzner accused “Mary Poppins” of attractive within the destructive follow of blackface, which sees a non-Black actor put on make-up so as to create a cartoon of a Black individual. “Mary Poppins” reputedly tries to sidestep this custom by way of having the identify persona and Bert (Dick Van Dyke) be coated in soot all the way through a chimney sweeper-centered musical number scene. Whilst one may just attempt to make the argument that this scene is not attractive in the similar stereotypes as conventional blackface sequences, Pollack-Pelzner argues that the movie cannot break out its ebook supply subject matter, which incessantly did use chimney sweeps for racist jokes.
After all, some other folks on social media were not precisely proud of this take on the time. @coldxman on Twitter believes that folks have been searching for racism as though it have been like oil to be struck and @jencon1978 believed that the context of the scene involving soot didn’t represent the follow of blackface. Without reference to the place one stands in this specific issue, obviously Pollack-Pelzner believed it was once worth having a dialogue about, and given how incessantly other folks take a look at older movies via a contemporary lens, it is most probably now not a dialog that is going away anytime quickly.
