By Joshua Tyler
| Published 3 seconds ago
People often think of the 1960s as the Walt Disney Company’s family-friendly golden age. Those films are viewed as a representation of what entertainment can be like when it’s not pushing an agenda or trying to trick the audience into embracing some sort of fringe belief. Anyone who thinks that couldn’t be more wrong.
The 1960s were ground zero for a massive cultural shift happening in the United States, and ideas like the hippy movement and the feminist movement, while not popular in the mainstream, were already quietly being embraced by the artists and creatives making Disney’s films. So when Walt Disney put together a team to make Mary Poppins in 1963, whether or not he knew it, his family-friendly movie about a magical nanny became one of the earliest films to screenwash resistant audiences in favor of a rising wave of counterculture beliefs.
screenwashed (adjective) — When something seen on a screen completely changes how someone thinks or feels, as if their old beliefs were erased and replaced by what they just saw.
This is the story of how Mary Poppins screenwashed American children into joining an ideology their parents had already rejected, and in the process created the disasters of the modern world.
Mary Poppins Is A Totally Different Character In The Books
Mary Poppins was adapted from a book by author P.L Travers. If you’ve read the Travers books, you probably noticed that they’re almost nothing like the iconic Disney movie.
Travers’ story is strange, strict, and occasionally uncomfortable. Disney’s version rewrites it into something softer, shinier, and far more ideologically driven. PL Travers hated everything about Disney’s movie and strongly objected to it, loudly claiming that it totally subverted and misrepresented the values she was trying to teach kids in her books.
The changes start with Mary Poppins herself, who in the books is not a fun, whimsical character who lives her life indulging children’s fantasies. Travers’ version of the character is stern, impatient, and distant. She’s not very nice most of the time, and she’s incredibly strict. She never nurtures; she only corrects. Her goal is to help the children in her care become better adults.
The movie version takes the opposite approach. She puts on a stern front, but ultimately she’s indulgent and encouraging of whimsy and fantasy. She looks down on practicality and uses shortcuts like magic to help the children avoid doing actual work. The movie itself sneers at anything that isn’t purely fun and goes out of its way to push the idea to viewers that a child’s life should be little more than dancing on the ceiling.
Disney Turns Dad Into The Ultimate Villain
Disney’s approach to Mary Poppins makes the movie’s villain Mr. Banks. In the books, he is not the villain. He’s a normal father and is treated as a valued member of the household and leader of the family.
In the movie, Mr. Banks is treated as a monster, and the film ends by literally telling him to go fly a kite.
On paper, there’s nothing villainous about what Mr. Banks is doing. He occasionally suggests that his wife should take her family responsibilities more seriously, after she literally loses the kids and doesn’t seem to care. He wants his kids to be well-mannered and respectful. He wants to take his son to work and teach him how to get a job. He tries to help his kids learn the value of money, and wants to open up a savings account for them.
These basic, standard, good parenting ideas are all treated by the movie as pure villainy. It’s Mary Poppins’s job to teach the family how to subvert the practical advice of Mr. Banks.
Feed The Birds, Or Else
The film makes deriding practical advice work for the audience by using a well-known propaganda technique called poisoning the well. Poisoning the well is what happens when an idea is discredited by attacking the source of the idea, rather than the idea itself.
So, if you have someone evil say something reasonable, and then make everyone act like those ideas are as evil as the person saying them, then people will associate those ideas with evil. It doesn’t matter how reasonable or logical those ideas might be.
The famous “Feed the Birds” moment in Mary Poppins is the biggest, most manipulative emotional knife twist. And it’s all set up as a trap by Mary Poppins.
The children’s father tells Mary Poppins he wants to take the children with him to the bank tomorrow, to open a savings account. Mary Poppins agrees, knowing the route he’ll take to the bank.
That night, Mary Poppins sings a magical song about a homeless woman who feeds the birds, and tells the kids they should give her money if they want the saints to look kindly on them. Mary is well aware that they’ll pass this woman on their way to the bank, though the kids believe it’s simply a fantastical story.
The next day, on the way to the bank, Mr. Banks and the children encounter the homeless bird feeder. After a night of pre-programming by Mary Poppins, the children want to help her and give her the money Mr. Banks wants them to put in the bank.
Mr. Banks kindly suggests that the money could be saved instead. The kids freak out, they pout, and they act like monsters for the rest of their trip to the bank, eventually behaving so badly that they get their father fired from his job.
The film frames this entire sequence as a moral failure on the part of Mr. Banks. The camera lingers. The music swells. The audience is trained to feel that prudence is cruelty and Mr. Banks deserves whatever he gets after his refusal to hand over money to a homeless woman.
How Mary Poppins Warps Audiences Against Long-Term Thinking
The real trick here is that the movie and the Feed The Birds sequence in particular, isn’t actually arguing against greed. It’s arguing against long-term thinking. It reframes responsibility as emotional coldness. It quietly tells children, and the parents watching with them, that planning ahead is somehow less virtuous than impulsive generosity.
This was also one of the core beliefs of the early 1960s counterculture movement. Long-term planning was framed by hippies as “submission to the system.” That’s not in a movie like Mary Poppins by accident. That’s intentional conditioning.
Except Mr. Banks isn’t wrong. He’s right. Saving money is good advice. Teaching a child that money has future value is one of the most important lessons a parent can give. But Mary Poppins turns that into a character flaw, because the story has a set of subversive ideas it’s delivering.
Mary Poppins Shames Responsible Fathers And Encourages Absent Mothers
That’s the only reason Mr. Banks is in the movie. He screenwashes the audience against the basic, common-sense family values that were popular at the time. Values that people couldn’t be convinced to abandon through honest debate.
In contrast to Mr. Banks, Mrs. Banks is functionally absent. She leaves the children daily to attend political causes, marches, and meetings. The film plays this as quirky and admirable. Her absence isn’t framed as neglect; it’s framed as liberation. She’s doing important work, after all. Work that just happens to require abandoning her kids entirely to a stranger with supernatural powers.
The movie never asks the obvious question: why is it okay for the mother to be gone doing things that contribute nothing to the family, but monstrous for the father to be busy making money to support them?
That asymmetry is intentional. The film wants you to be angry at the man who pays the bills and indifferent to the woman who doesn’t come home. Responsibility is recoded as oppression. Absence is recoded as self-actualization.
Emotional Reframing To Manipulating The Audience
When Mary Poppins arrives she doesn’t replace the parents, she overwrites them. She’s not just a nanny. She’s a psychological counterweight. She rewards emotional indulgence. She ridicules discipline. She makes authority figures look foolish. She trains the children to associate joy with rule-breaking and resentment with structure.
This is classic emotional reframing.
Emotional reframing is a persuasion technique where a person, story, or message changes how you feel about an idea without changing the facts of the idea itself.
Mary Poppins doesn’t argue with Mr. Banks. She outshines him. She doesn’t prove him wrong, she makes him look irrelevant. That’s how propaganda works. You don’t refute the opposing idea; you make it feel old, uncool, and joyless.
Even the bank itself is depicted as a literal monster. Columns like teeth, employees like drones. It’s not a place where stability is created; it’s a villain’s lair. Never mind that the bank represents the very system keeping the household afloat. The audience is trained to cheer when it collapses into chaos.
By the time the movie ends, Mr. Banks has been “fixed.” And how is he fixed? Not by being validated. Not by being appreciated. But by being transformed into a whimsical, kite-flying man who abandons seriousness altogether.
Responsible Adults Must Become Irresponsible Children To Avoid Becoming Villains
That’s the movie’s final trick: the father must become a child to be redeemed. He doesn’t get credit for being right. He gets rewarded for giving up. His arc isn’t growth, it’s surrender. The movie’s message is clear: responsibility must yield to sentiment, or it deserves to be mocked into extinction.
Mary Poppins teaches children that adults who plan are villains, that mothers don’t need to be present, and that money is something you feel about, not something you manage. It wraps that lesson in warmth, then dares you to question it without looking like the bad guy yourself.
That’s what being screenwashed looks like. You walk in thinking you’re watching a harmless musical. You walk out believing the most responsible person in the room was the problem all along.
Enjoy your arrested development, kids, you’ve been screenwashed.
