Nothing screams creativity quite like something called the sodium vapor process, am I right? Okay okay, I promise I’m going somewhere with this. In fact, we’re headed to the Banks’ house in London, England, where Mary Poppins was born. You probably remember the big moments, like dancing penguins and floating tea parties, and the general sense that anything could happen. But to make that world believable, Disney didn’t cut around the magic or hide it behind clever edits. They made it possible for real people to move naturally inside a completely fantastical world.

That’s where the sodium vapor process came in. Unlike traditional green screens, which still come with major restrictions on movement, fabric, and color, this process allowed actors to exist cleanly inside animated worlds with depth and interaction that hadn’t really been possible before. One of the best places you can see how well it worked is Mary’s white organdy hat. It’s light and translucent, and things pass behind it in a way that really shouldn’t work. And yet it does. If you haven’t watched it in a while, go back and look. It still holds up shockingly well. We’d probably still use that process today if it hadn’t been incredibly difficult to make, wildly expensive and, well, literally lost. But I’m very glad we got an organdy hat dancing with cartoon penguins out of the deal.

Kewpies started as cupid-inspired cartoon characters drawn by illustrator Rose O’Neill in the early 1900s, and eventually became the world’s first mass-marketed doll. In fact, I had one as a kid. It scared me. I cried. Now I’m fully obsessed, not just with their mischievous little faces, but their endearingly awkward vibe. What I love most, though, is how O’Neill used them. Yes, they were dolls people bought, but they also became an unexpected and highly visible symbol of the women’s suffrage movement. At the time, suffrage protesters were often portrayed as old, angry, or unfeminine. O’Neill pushed back by featuring Kewpies in posters and illustrations that framed the movement as youthful, warm, and hopeful. And then she took it even further.

At one rally, O’Neill hired a woman pilot, Katherine Stinson, to fly overhead and release Kewpie dolls by parachute, each wearing a sash that read “I support women’s rights.” Planes weren’t exactly easy to come by at the time, let alone a female pilot. Katherine was literally the fourth woman in the United States to earn her license. And honestly, even today, pitching “what if we drop dolls from the sky” would probably get you laughed out of a meeting. It was outrageous, complicated, and made one hell of an impact. The whole ethos behind Kewpies was doing good deeds in funny ways, and this was exactly that. Wild planning, deep belief in the idea, and a refusal to give up even when the logistics felt impossible.

Imagine you’re on a flight with your kid. When you land, they ask why we can’t just teleport. It’s the kind of question kids ask with total sincerity, not “could we someday,” but “why not now?” In 1943, Edwin Land got a version of that question from his daughter after taking a photo of her. She asked why she couldn’t see the picture immediately. And instead of explaining why the world didn’t work that way yet, he became completely obsessed. That question eventually became the foundation of the Polaroid camera.

What followed took years. Not because it was easy or obvious, but because he couldn’t let the question go. What came out of that fixation wasn’t just a camera, but an experience. The photo sliding out. The pause. The slow reveal in your hands, like a tiny magic trick. Decades later, we aren’t just using Polaroids. We’re shaking it like them too. Holding proof that even when something feels impossible, it’s still worth trying.