Question: How did you jump into the chimneys? It was blazing and they worked everything out on that sound stage, in the back lot with the choreography.” Chimney Sweep Pete Menefee on the Chimney Sweeps Rooftop Stunts in Mary Poppins we had to wear the name tags but we were allowed to rehearse because it was so hot in swim trunks because it was blazing back there. Walt was there every day, every single day. PM: “Rehearsals were held on the back lot. Chimney Sweep Pete Menefee on Mary Poppins Rehearsals: I’ll never look at the movie or the Chimney Sweep scene the same way again as I’ll have a whole new appreciation for all the dancers extremely hard work and rehearsals after hearing Pete’s tales. I loved hearing Pete spill his story as he reminisced about his days on set filming Mary Poppins. My children and I absolutely adore everything Mary Poppins as it is one of the very 1st Disney movies I ever introduced to my kids – I knew the music would captivate them and the story would capture their hearts! You can check out the new Mary Poppins Blu Ray DVD combo package and it’s available online and in stores for purchase on the December 10th. Pete was just 21 when he filmed Mary Poppins, a movie that is celebrating 50 years next week when it releases from the Disney Vault on December 10th. And yes, those chimney sweeps even rehearsed in swim trunks because they filmed in the summer and it was boiling hot! Travers later re-wrote the chapters in a revised edition of the book, in which Poppins and Jane and Michael Banks are transported to a South Sea Island, where the nanny uses the offensive phrase ‘pickaninny’ and speaks in a racially charged southern American dialect.Earlier this month I sat down with Pete Menefee, one of the chimney sweeps from Disney’s classic movie, Mary Poppins to get the inside scoop on what it was like to be a dancer in a movie that was quick to become a Disney classic. Pollack-Pelzner has also pointed to other instances of archaic, racially-loaded language in Travers’ Poppins books, which in once instance actually saw her books banned from the San Francisco Public Library in the early 80s. In the 1952 novel Mary Poppins in the Park, the nanny herself tells an upset young Michael, ‘I understand that you’re behaving like a Hottentot.’” And it’s not only fools like the Admiral who invoke this language. It’s a parody of black menace it’s even posted on a white nationalist website as evidence of the film’s racial hierarchy. “We’re in on the joke, such as it is: These aren’t really black Africans they’re grinning white dancers in blackface. When the dark figures of the chimney sweeps step in time on a roof, a naval buffoon, Admiral Boom, shouts, ‘We’re being attacked by Hottentots!’ and orders his cannon to be fired at the ‘cheeky devils.’ “The 1964 film replays this racial panic in a farcical key. When he tries to approach the cook, she threatens to quit: ‘If that Hottentot goes into the chimney, I shall go out the door,’ she says, using an archaic slur for black South Africans that recurs on page and screen. “’Don’t touch me, you black heathen,’ a housemaid screams in Mary Poppins Opens the Door (1943), as a sweep reaches out his darkened hand. “This might seem like an innocuous comic scene if Travers’s novels didn’t associate chimney sweeps’ blackened faces with racial caricature,” he writes.
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