Hard to believe this movie came out eight (!) years ago. How time flies… 
I love that movie, but the irony is so thick you could spread it on toast.
A movie about Disney-fying Mary Poppins ends up Disney-fying Walt Disney.
And if it wasn’t for that movie I wouldn’t have got the FJ answer.
It looks like we were not the only ones struggling to make the connection. The page views on her Wiki page were up by about 26K yesterday.
Yeah, not explaining who P.L. Travers was is an odd omission, something that Trebek would have added as a matter of course. I’m surprised they didn’t re-record that segment, or even just have Dr. Oz dub in something like “author of Mary Poppins.” The camera usually isn’t on the host when the FJ responses are being revealed, so it seems like it would have been easy enough to edit a mention of Mary Poppins into the audio.
Maybe the fact that they made a movie about it in the past decade was the reason this was something people would be expected to know? I vaguely recall the movie’s coming out, but I never saw it. I don’t ever recall thinking that the author of Mary Poppins was much of a household name in America.
In fact, I wasn’t even sure that the movie Mary Poppins was based on a book. My thought process on FJ was more like “Hmm, they could be referring to Mary Poppins. Was that based on a book? I don’t know, but if I did know, and I knew the author’s name, that would be my guess. Should I whip out my phone and Google it right now? Nah, I’ll just wait till they reveal the correct response.”
Heck, even if I had seen the movie (which I haven’t) I wouldn’t have remembered the name of that character. That FJ was pretty obscure.
It was very considerate of the NCAA to have their basketball tournament this week, and last.
Growing up in the early '60s, I think it was unusual not to have known of Mary Poppins or PL Travers, since our teachers (at least where I went to school) would often read chapters from the books to us in class. I didn’t read the books myself until I was middle-aged, and I was surprised by how different they were from the 1964 movie (which is still one of my happiest childhood memories). Some parts are downright creepy and gave me the chills reading them alone in my apartment at 2:00 in the morning. Definitely not the stuff you’d expect to see in a Disney film!
I remember a woman coming to my second grade class and giving a presentation centered on the word “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” There was another who talked about “Do, re, mi,” and children whose father wouldn’t allow them to sing. I realize now these must have been promos aimed at raising awareness of Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, neither of which would be released for another couple of years.
Did anybody else have a similar experience when they were in grade school?
I remember the movie, but I don’t recall any mention of the book in grade school. So it wasn’t a universal thing. (I went to grade school in the 60s too.)
The weird thing is, my brain skipped a groove in processing the clue, but I got the right response, anyway. It went something like…
"Oh, there was that movie a few years ago, about an English author, didn’t like the movie that Disney made of her book, What Disney movie was it in the '60s? Peter Pan, that’s it. So who was the author? Something-Travers, I think; maybe P.L. Travers, that sounds familiar. Anyway, I don’t need the whole name, just the last name is usually good enough.
Who is Travers?"
My brain is really quite a wonder, sometimes.
Lateral thinking. I once had a similar experience playing “The Name [That Celebrity] Game”:
John Joseph Ryan. → Definitely Irish. → Probably an actor. → An actor who played an Irishman? → “John.” Hmmm, maybe “Jack”? → Jack “Steve McGarrett” Lord!
All of which went through my mind in less than two seconds.
Sometimes I amaze even myself! 
I think we need to remember that if you grew up in the 1960s, you are much older than the typical Jeopardy contestant today. (Typical viewer, less so, but typical contestant, definitely.) Just last night or the night before, there was a triple stumper where the correct response was George Burns. IIRC the clue even contained a reference to “good night, Gracie” and none of them even ventured a guess. It was at that moment that I realized all three contestants were likely younger than I. And I was in grade school in the 80s.
Regarding Mary Poppins, yeah, maybe this is a generational thing, but I saw the movie several times in childhood, and have always had at least a passing interest in literature, and it’s always been my impression that at least in the USA, Mary Poppins is known almost exclusively as a movie. It’s not like Harry Potter or the Chronicles of Narnia, which you’d expect any above-average-intelligence person to know were originally book series.
I’m amazed whenever they show a photo of, say, Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant, and none of the contestants even hazard a guess. I always think to myself “Oh, crap. Am I really that old?!?”
I vaguely remember Burns and Allen being on TV in the '50s, but I never really watched their show until it was on in reruns late at night on a local MPS/SP station in the '80s. I suspect most of the young’uns from that era would know George from the Oh, God! movies only.
In my experience, the cultural horizons of most 30-somethings nowadays extend maybe to the 1990s. They can’t be bothered to consider anything that came before.
I’m amazed when they have categories of modern music, and I seriously want to ask “did you just make up those band names?”
Back to the topic at hand, this pretty much encapsulates my attitude as well. Couric even managed to tone down what was, for me, her most aggravating quirk (the near-rapturous “You found the Daily Double!!!”).
When Oz started, my reaction was that he wasn’t as bad as I’d feared; now, while I still watch, I mute the sound and depend on closed captions.
I noticed that and even rewound to make sure.
Don’t they have producers talking in their ear?
Aaron Rogers is up next (April 5-16)
Brian
Had to Google “Aaron Rogers”, still don’t really know who that guy is. But I won’t miss Oz.
He’s the star of several State Farm commercials:
Brian
ESPN article:
Brian