Mary Poppins in 2004, Walt Disney first attempted to purchase the film rights to "Mary Poppins" from P. L. Travers as early as 1938, but was rebuffed because Travers did not believe a film version of her books would do justice to her creation and did not want an animated cartoon based on it. The books had been a favourite of Disney's daughters when they were children, and he finally succeeded in purchasing the rights in 1961, although Travers demanded and got script approval rights. The relationship between Travers and Disney is detailed in "Mary Poppins She Wrote", a biography of Travers,
Mary Poppins British children's literature during the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games. In a sequence called "", over thirty Mary Poppins' descended with umbrellas to fight and defeat the villains Queen of Hearts, Captain Hook, Cruella de Vil, and Lord Voldemort, who were haunting children's dreams. The silhouette of Mary Poppins with an umbrella was used on the cover of the special issue of the journal "Friction" dedicated to the 6th World Tribology Congress in Beijing. It shows the process of detachment of an adhesive contact made in the form of a flat punch in the character's shape. Mary