Having recently re-watched “Mary Poppins”, my head is still filled with the many fantastical visions from that film, from the lovely scene of the nannies being blown away with the wind like so many dandelion seeds, to the haunting melody of “Feed the Birds”, to the delightful sight of Mary and her charges walking confidently up a stairway made of smoke.
When I was a child, the centerpiece of the film had been the sequence where Mary, Bert and the kids jump into a painting and enter a magical animated world — the part of the movie that my family always refers to as “Dick Van Dyke dancing with penguins”. It’s the point in the film where the animated tradition of Disney and the live action characters become most fully wed to create a cohesive vision.
It occurs to me now that what I was seeing on screen will soon become a reality for many of us. What was merely fantasy in 1964 will, in the next few years, become an accepted part of our world. Interaction technologies that are already beginning to emerge will soon allow children everywhere to dance with those animated penguins, in the comfort of their own living rooms.
As delightful as this will be, there is a potential downside. Future generations may have trouble understanding “Mary Poppins”. When they see people on-screen cavorting around in make-believe worlds, they may simply say “What’s the big deal? I do that all the time!”