Walt Disney is celebrating the 60th anniversary of Mary Poppins with a reissue of 10 Songs From Mary Poppins. Originally released in 1964, the children’s album features Marni Nixon, Bill Lee, and Richard M. Sherman and includes beloved songs like “Spoonful of Sugar,” “Super-cali-fragil-istic-expi-ali-docious,” and “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” which won the 1964 Academy Award for Best Original Song. The song has since been covered by John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong. The album has been fully restored from the original album master and will be available for the first time in over 30 years. 10 Songs From Mary Poppins arrives on blue vinyl August 16.
Mary Poppins was Disney’s first live-action film and starred Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. It is based on P.L. Travers’ book series of the same name. In 1960, Walt Disney approached Richard and Robert Sherman—the siblings who had written “It’s A Small World (After All)” for the 1964 World’s Fair—and gave them a copy of Mary Poppins, asking if the material could be translated into a musical.
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“We said it would make the greatest musical fantasy of all time,” Richard Sherman revealed in a 1993 Houston Chronicle interview. “So we underlined some chapters that we felt were really musical. And when we showed Walt our notes and played the song sketches, he pulled out his book, and he’d underlined the very same chapters.” Robert added that it was, “one of the greatest feelings we’ve ever had.”
The Sherman brothers pulled inspiration from their lives when writing the soundtrack. Robert’s son Jeffrey Sherman revealed in 2020 that “Spoonful of Sugar” was inspired by his own description of the polio vaccine: “They put it on a sugar cube and you ate it.” “Super-cali-fragil-istic-expi-ali-docious” was inspired by a made-up game to find the longest word in the dictionary.
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