This LEGO® version of the Chocolate Room was made by Nick Franklin, a fan who owns an impressive collection of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory memorabilia. (See here for more items from his collection.)
If you look closely, you can see swirling lollipops, the Great Glass Elevator, Augustus Gloop stuck in the chocolate tube and Willy Wonka, who was made with a ring-master’s face and other LEGO® pieces. The chocolate river was created using a glue gun, with acrylic and gold paint applied on top.
Introduction
As we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the story has obviously amply repaid the perceptive reviewers’ early faith in it and even more amply put paid to others’ dismissals. Not only does it still sell nearly half a million copies a year around the world, but references to it permeate popular culture as abundantly and apparently unstoppably as the smell of chocolate does the air of Wonka’s factory.
In 2009, Christopher Lloyd appeared in an online trailer for a fake horror film called Gobstopper, in which he plays a crazed Willy Wonka scaring teenagers visiting his chocolate factory.
Its very language has been adopted by our culture at large. ‘Willy Wonka’ is now shorthand for any kind of innovator or eccentric genius.The term has been used to describe everything from a British sweet-maker to a marijuana grower in Seattle and, at this very moment of typing, a Google alert has popped up to tell me that most recently a new manufacturer has been described as ‘the Willy Wonka of 3D printing’. Having a Golden Ticket is synonymous with getting an access-all-areas pass to anything desirable. Most recently commentators were asking whether Twitter’s IPO was ‘a Golden Ticket or all hype?’. It’s the go-to theme of anyone setting up a competition, from the individual amateur (I have lost count of the number of children’s parties I have been to as both child and parent where it was used in the games) to global brands. Tesco and Virgin have run Golden Ticket campaigns. Nestlé used it too when they launched one of their Wonka-brand ranges. As did – whisper (or Wispa) it – Cadbury, during the 2012 Olympics, offering seats at the Games to lucky winners. Of course, having a good seat at any of the most popular events at the Olympics was also referred to generally as having a Golden Ticket and, ironically, some of the security arrangements were criticized as ‘handing a Golden Ticket to terrorists’. This was not the only Charlie reference at the London 2012 Olympics as Russell Brand, arguably Britain’s most famous eccentric, showed up at the closing ceremony in an outfit clearly channelling Willy Wonka. Singing ‘Pure Imagination’ – the best-known song from the 1971 film – to the thousands in the stadium and the millions worldwide watching from their homes, he summed up the mood of exuberant, wide-eyed wonder at all they had seen over the previous astonishing few weeks.
Russell Brand dressed as Willy Wonka at the 2012 Olympics, London.
The language and the tropes of Roald Dahl’s fifty-year-old book are now firmly embedded in our culture. Some of this can be attributed to the unusual and privileged position children’s books hold in our lives. When Charlie was first published in 1964, you could still count on living a broadly similar lifestyle to your parents and peers, and on sharing a common body of knowledge – cultural, social, academic and whatever else. Since then, however, we have increasingly left behind collective experiences and replaced them with individualized ones. People’s life journeys have changed dramatically. No longer resembling a conveyor-beltful of caramels passing at a steady clip in endless rows through an enrobing machine, to be packed neatly into boxes at the other end, life journeys have become more like bags of Maltesers being upended and skittering all over the floor to unpredictable resting places.
But children’s lives in general have remained more uniform, and the experiences we share in childhood – the books we read, the TV programmes we watch and, indeed, the sweets we eat – later become rare moments of connection between strangers, and within and among generations. There’s not a British thirty- or forty-something alive, for example, who hasn’t had a tipsy conversation or two with a friend about the opening lines of Bagpuss, or the irreproducible thrill of one’s first packet of Space Dust, while boggling over the fact that they can recall how candy cigarettes and cocoa-dusted coconut ‘tobacco’ used to be sold with blithe unconcern in every sweet shop in the land.
In 2006, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The Ride opened at the Alton Towers theme park in Staffordshire, England. The eleven-minute experience features a boat ride along the chocolate river, during which passengers encounter characters from the book, and it ends with a flight-simulation trip in the Great Glass Elevator.
But it is our books that bind us most. They last longer than sweets, and withstand re-reading better than television withstands re-watching. We love them more passionately, and often we get a second bite at the cherry when we return to read them to our own children. In 2012, research by the University of Worcester found that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was among the most common children’s book adults had read – in a list with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Wind in the Willows. Such a finding suggests this is not a book that people are ever going to abandon or forget.
Nick Franklin started his collection of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory memorabilia in 2005 after seeing the Tim Burton adaptation, but it was the 1971 film that sparked his interest in prop design, which is now his profession. He has close to a thousand items in his collection in Salford, England.
A Willy Wonka’s Candy Factory Kit with original packaging, instructions, wrappers and mould.
TOP LEFT: Wonka collectible tin, created by Bee International.
TOP RIGHT: Mini pinball game that came in a cereal packet in Argentina.
BOTTOM LEFT: Limited-edition Oompa-Loompa Pullip doll, inspired by the 2005 film. Made by Cheonsang Cheonha, South Korea.
BOTTOM RIGHT: COLLECTIBLE Kubrick™ mini figurines.
This Golden Record LP features songs from the 1971 film as well as other confectionery-inspired songs, performed by the Golden Orchestra and Chorus.
Sent by Television
Not many modern stories have embedded themselves either as wholly or as firmly in the collective consciousness as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has.
Mel Stuart’s film has helped enormously, of course, especially in the US, where its appearance on television amounts these days to a virtual Thanksgiving tradition – paralleling the annual Christmas outing of that other great dual-natured offering, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), whose festive cheer and happy ending belie a similarly dark melancholy underneath.
All this isn’t to say the book wouldn’t have endured without the film – far from it. After all, as we know, the film only took on its second life when video became popular in the 1980s. Indeed Charlie also inspired a video game in 1985. By this decade, Charlie had been a bestseller for over twenty years and the rest of Roald Dahl’s books habitually stormed the charts, without any help from anyone other than the author and his armies of fans spreading the word from child to child, school to school, country to country, all round the world.
But when a film adaptation of a book is disseminated at least once a year across millions and millions of homes and viewers, and taken almost as much to heart as the book itself is – well, then you might say you’ve got a Golden Ticket to the infiltration of just about every area of pop culture there is.
Andy Samberg as the Jewish Willy Wonka with Ben Stiller in Saturday Night Live (2011).
It has been endlessly and lovingly parodied everywhere, from The Simpsons to Saturday Night Live (one of whose skits on Charlie shows Glen Wonka, Willy’s brother and the factory’s accountant, being appalled by the news that he’s handed over control of the business to an eight-year-old kid – ‘Great . . . I’ll tell that to our stockholders when they come down here and beat us bloody with their candy canes’). Innumerable other shows and writers – as well as a surprising number of rappers and other musicians – have referenced or borrowed from it. The whole Family Guy episode ‘Wasted Talent’ (2000) is a tribute to the book/film, as Peter drinks extra Pawtucket Patriot beers to try to win one of the silver scrolls that will get him on a tour of the brewery, whose singing workers are called Chumbawumbas. Instead of hobbling and falling over on his way to greet his guests and surprising them with a somersault and perfect landing like Wonka, Pawtucket Pat pretends to be gunned down in a drive-by shooting. In the Beer Room, he sings ‘Pure Inebriation’, and when Peter and Brian sneak off to try out the ‘beer that never goes flat’ it lifts them off the floor and towards an exhaust fan in the ceiling until they manage to fart their way back down.
Jeff Richards as Willy Wonka and Amy Poehler as Charlie in the sketch about Glen Wonka (played by ex-vice president Al Gore) in Saturday Night Live (2002).
In 30 Rock (2013), Jack McBrayer as Kenneth pretends to be a rival network executive, bribing a candidate to steal a script that’s in development (referencing the Slugworth sub-plot in the 1971 film).
Homage to Willy Wonka is paid in South Park too. In the ‘A Ladder to Heaven’ episode (2002), Lolly the Candy Man runs a contest for a shopping spree in his store, Lolly’s Candy Factory, with the winning ticket acquired by Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny, while the singing cigarette-factory workers in the episode ‘Butt Out’ (2003) resemble an Oompa-Loompa tribute band.
In Epic Movie (2007), Crispin Glover parodies ‘Willy’, a character styled on Johnny Depp’s depiction of Willy Wonka in Tim Burton’s film.
And the penultimate episode of Tina Fey’s 30 Rock (2013) is built round Kenneth and Jack taking five people (called Charlie, Augustus, Violet, Veruca and Mike), each of them competing to become Jack’s successor at NBC, on a tour that is secretly the final part of their interview to decide who should become the network’s new president. All the candidates are found wanting and in the end Jack decides that the president should be someone who is pure in heart and loves television.
‘You like NBC, don’t you, Kenneth?’
‘I think it’s the most wonderful place in the whole wide world.’
‘Good. Because I’m giving it to you. The whole thing.’
The only thing that’s missing is a glass elevator to round things off. Tracy probably smashed it to bits during rehearsal.
• • •
The Simpsons has a little Charlie and the Chocolate Factory obsession. In Season 15’s episode ‘Simple Simpson’ (2004), Homer – whose love of pig meat rivals Charlie Bucket’s adoration of cacao-bean derivatives – becomes intrigued by a contest held by
• • •
(the top-hatted) Farmer Billy’s bacon factory, whose Golden Ticket winner will be allowed to visit the hallowed site. Alas, he has to settle for a silver one, and only gets to judge the pig competition at the county fair.
In ‘The Ziff Who Came to Dinner’ (2004), Artie asks Lisa if her father ever reads stories to her. ‘He tried once,’ she replies. ‘But he got confused and thought the book was real. He’s still looking for that chocolate factory. It consumes him.’
Earlier in the series, in ‘Lisa’s Rival’ (1994), there is a Gloop-like German foreign-exchange student, Üter Zörker. He first appears in the ‘Treehouse of Horror IV’ episode (1993), offering Milhouse a bite of his ‘Vengelerstrasse bar. I also have a bag of marzipan Joy Joys . . . mit iodine,’ and in ‘Treehouse of Horror V’ (1994) Üter gets chopped into bratwurst (which you could easily imagine them squeezing through pipes to make). For Diorama-rama day at Springfield Elementary in ‘Lisa’s Rival’, he chooses to do Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Principal Skinner comes to examine Üter’s entry but:
Skinner: This is just an empty box!
Üter [chocolate smeared round his face and hands]: I begged you to look at mine first! I begged you!
• • •
There’s also an Ah, Fudge! Factory in downtown Springfield but – as its products are confections of powdered milk, cocoa and caustic chemicals rather than luscious waterfall-mixed chocolate, innovation, imagination and fabulism – its resemblance ends there. It’s the setting for one of the educational films shown to Bart’s class, this time about the history of chocolate:
Welcome to the chocolate factory. I’m Troy McClure . . . The history of chocolate begins with the ancient Aztecs. In those days, instead of being wrapped in a hygienic package, chocolate was wrapped in a tobacco leaf. And instead of being pure chocolate, like we have today, it was mixed with shredded tobacco. And they didn’t eat it – they smoked it!
• • •
Not altogether different from what British children were buying in the eighties, as I say, but there you go. Everyone’s comedy is somebody else’s tragedy. *Sigh*.
Charlie has proved as fertile an inspiration for creators of video games as it has in every other sphere. A computer game set in the chocolate factory first appeared in 1985 and the idea has been frequently reinvented ever since. Charlie and Willy Wonka have also had their own island within the popular children’s online world Poptropica since 2012.
Louise Post from the band Veruca Salt, dressed like Veruca Salt at a concert (2006).
Charlie is a popular point of reference for rappers too. ‘Monster’ on Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album (2010) has the lines ‘in that Tonka / colour of Willy Wonka’ rapped by Nicki Minaj. Wiz Khalifa in ‘Purple Flowers’ on his Yellow Starships album (2012) says ‘Willy Wonka’s in my closet, all these flavors / Shop with me you’ll get exhausted’. And Boston rapper B-Baz’s ‘Willy Wonka, Willy Wonka (Interlude)’ on his Genesis mixtape (2012) refers to his desire to check out Wonka’s stock and purchase ‘something really special’ – undoubtedly meaning the wide variety of delicious chocolate bars with which he likes to keep himself supplied. Ahem.
Other musician fans include the alt-rock band Veruca Salt and, if we expand our remit a little to the chocolate factory’s sequel Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972), the US indie rock group The Vermicious Knid, who sadly disbanded in 2006. Another great aficionado is Ozzy Osbourne, as Julie Dawn Cole discovered a few years ago when she was introduced to Sharon Osbourne on the set of a music video being produced by Rob Newman. He had grown up next door to the Dahls in the 1960s and his father Robert Newman had been the Quaker Oats Company’s representative on the Willy Wonka film set, there to keep an eye on the expenses being incurred. As a result, young Rob had also been on set most days and made friends with all the cast – Julie Dawn Cole most firmly and enduringly.
Sharon called him over and said, ‘You’ll never guess who this is!’ And he stopped production for half an hour while he peppered me with questions: ‘Was the river really chocolate?’ and so on! Apparently Kelly Osbourne was desperate to play Veruca Salt in the [Tim Burton] remake but she was too old.
There’s also Ozzy’s fellow rocker Marilyn Manson, who often recites at the beginning of his concerts the poem Gene Wilder delivers on the SS Wonkatania as he and the children travel down the chocolate river (‘There’s no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going . . .’). He also used it as the prelude to his album Portrait of an American Family (1994). The promo single for that album was accompanied by a video showing Manson and his band sailing down a river of blood through a tunnel lined with hideous images. He cites the story as an example of the perils of self-indulgence and self-worship which are – apparently – the true evil. Satan’s just a guy with a bad rep – cranky from low blood sugar, perhaps. When it was announced that Burton was making his film, Manson was quoted as saying he was being considered for the role of Wonka, although there seems to be no truth in this. But a source did say that Depp had pictures of Manson and played his music to help hone the darker edge he was giving Wonka, so maybe there’s a homage in there somewhere. Or a homage to a homage. Or – let’s stop before we eat ourselves.
Australian comedian Matthew Hardy with Julie Dawn Cole.
Australian comic Matthew Hardy was inspired by his love of the film to create a hit two-man comedy show, Willy Wonka Explained: The Veruca Salt Sessions. ‘I’d been a fan since I first saw it when I was five years old. I was shocked that it ended. I felt like I was one of Charlie Bucket’s friends.’ But it was Veruca Salt he loved best. ‘All that talking back to adults and having authority over them – I couldn’t believe it!’ Whenever he broke up with a girlfriend or moved to a new city or country, he would return to the film, comfort-watching it again and again. He began to wonder why it – and Veruca – had such a hold over him but it wasn’t until he was living in the US as an adult that the idea to write a show about his obsession took hold.
A promotional poster for Matthew Hardy’s show with Julie Dawn Cole, which first ran in Melbourne (2005).
He had been invited to give a talk to a teacher friend’s class on Long Island about Australia, and during it a pupil started eating his lunch sandwich and said, ‘Man, this is scrumdiddlyumptious!’ Then on a later visit to a Manhattan bar a woman he was talking to ordered an Everlasting Gobstopper cocktail ‘which was written up on the board in the Wonka font,’ he says. That’s when he mustered the courage to send an email to Julie Dawn Cole’s agent asking if he could interview her. She agreed, and out of their talks Hardy constructed a show to take to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. But then, when Cole agreed to come over from England and help promote it, she said to Hardy, ‘Why just promote it? I’m still an actress,’ and so it evolved into a two-hander, each playing ‘themselves’ in therapy, and introducing new elements such as readings from the letters Julie had sent home to her mother while she was filming in Munich.
‘As the script took shape we both got really excited about it,’ says Hardy. The feeling wasn’t misplaced. The show was a smash in Melbourne in 2005 and later at the 2010 Edinburgh Comedy Festival in Scotland.
Hardy still loves Veruca Salt and the film. ‘My five-year-old nephew cried the other day at the wedding scene in Shrek and he didn’t know why. That’s the fascinating thing about a well-told story – it’s understood, in some way, by everybody.’
Various memes using the characters from the 1971 film adaptation.
Such uses and references are a testament to the widespread nature of Charlie’s fame and enduring hold on our hearts and imaginations, depending as they do on an immediate, collective understanding of the original. Their creators know that they can rely on any average audience to get the joke. This is never more true than when it comes to the successful generation of memes: those little snatches of humour, or clutch of film frames, or evocative photos or facial expressions plucked out of their original context, given a little creative twist and packaged up as GIFs or jpegs and sent out into the cyberworld. The infinite adaptability of Wonka’s mercurial nature and Gene Wilder’s enigmatic portrayal have proved irresistible to the inventors of these little snippets that live or die according to the instantaneous recognition and quick rush of memory and association they induce. They are like catching sight of the spine of a book you love on a friend’s shelf – a little reminder of our shared knowledge, a little reminder of a common delight.
There’s something about all these jokes, references, spin-offs and memes that chimes happily with the subversive undertow of Charlie. Whether Roald Dahl would have seen it like that or whether his feelings about popular ‘unauthorized’ interpretations and uses of his book would have been the same as those he expressed for the authorized transformation of Charlie by Mel Stuart is a matter of conjecture. Does the internet free the anarchist or render him redundant? Discuss animatedly, among yourselves.
Top Chef: Just Desserts
In 2011, America’s Top Chef programme developed a spin-off series – Top Chef: Just Desserts – which concentrated specifically on pastry chefs. To celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the release of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, one of the episodes gathered together the actors who had played the original ticket winners (save Michael Böllner) to be guests and asked the Top Chef contestants to create their own edible world of Wonka-ish wonder. The contestants were almost overcome. ‘Everyone wants to do this in their life, as a pastry chef,’ said the eventual winner, Katzie Guy-Hamilton, who conjured up a carrot patch (slices of cake buried in Oreo soil) and a beehive that dripped real honey. ‘And if they don’t, they’re silly.’ Well said, that girl. Except that, trust me, it’s not just pastry chefs who long to get the chance.
LEFT: Judge Johnny Iuzzini examines a creation with Paris Themmen, Julie Dawn Cole and fellow judge Hubert Keller.
RIGHT: Contestant Sally Camacho made a wheelbarrow full of Oompa-Loompa crumbles (also called Oompa-Loompa droppings during the show): pistachio financiers, orange dirt and milk-chocolate mousse.
Together they came up with crumbled orange-sugar soil (though its inventor took the odd decision to call it ‘Oompa-Loompa droppings’, which made it slightly less mouth-watering), green doughnuts, edible wallpaper, peanut butter and jelly macaroons, and a brave, brave attempt at a giant gummy bear. They put together a chocolate fountain, whoopie-pie flowers, gingerbread dragonflies and baked cupcakes in golden eggshells. Altogether, a whipple-scrumptious delight.
ABOVE:
Dylan Lauren and her Candy Bar, Los Angeles.
In addition to the hundreds of amateur cooks and candymakers whose Roald Dahl-inspired creations can be seen on a thousand blogs, Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram shrines to their interests, professional chocolatiers, bakers and chefs around the world cite Charlie as their childhood inspiration. And, even if they don’t, as soon as they reach the headlines they will almost certainly be described as the Willy Wonka of the West Village/pastry/everything from soup to nuts.
Dylan Lauren, daughter of Ralph and creator of the Dylan’s Candy Bar chain of stores, remembers seeing the film when she was six, after which she spent years obsessed with sweets and chocolate. She once filled in a college application form that asked candidates to compare themselves to a foodstuff, place or object with an essay on ‘Why I Am Like An Everlasting Gobstopper’, and after graduating she travelled the world, discovering new forms of confectionery in far-flung places. She finally realized her chocolate-factory-inspired childhood dream when in 2001 she opened her first Candy Bar in Manhattan. Each store is a miniature Wonka wonderland: the fixtures and fittings are either made out of confectionery (such as the bubblegum-ball-filled stools and candy-mosaic tables) or look like it – mouldings that replicate lashings of dripping chocolate top the shelves, giant glass lollipop trees and huge possibly-chocolate bunnies populate the place.
ABOVE:
Dylan’s Candy Bar confectionery.
‘Lots of people call me “the Candy Queen” or the modern-day Willy Wonka!’ she says in her book Dylan’s Candy Bar: Unwrap Your Sweet Life. ‘But I have yet to figure out how to get a chocolate river running through the middle of America.’
Wait. Do I smell a sequel or what? Mr Burton, Mr Mendes, when either of you has a minute . . .
Jacques Torres with Oompa-Loompas at the fortieth-anniversary party of the 1971 film.
And what other reference could you possibly reach for when trying to describe master pastry chef and chocolate-maker Jacques Torres? He hosted the fortieth anniversary celebrations for the 1971 film in his New York City chocolate shop and recently designed his new factory in Brooklyn with a cacao-pod-shaped shop, a seventy-foot tunnel, a chocolate-powder room, an ice-cream room, a five-ton chocolate-melter and a layout that allows visitors to watch the assembly line of products as they emerge. As 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon would say, I would like to go there.
• • •
Molecular gastronomist Heston Blumenthal – the man who from his kitchen-slash-laboratory gave the world snail porridge, bacon-and-egg ice cream, sea-jelly eggs and meat fruit, and who probably is the closest thing we have in the UK to a real-life Willy Wonka – once created an entire four-course meal in tribute to his ‘childhood hero’ from the book he read with ‘complete and utter wonderment’ when he was a boy. It comprised a lickable wallpaper amuse-bouche (apple, sausage and prawn cocktail flavours – not together – made by centrifugally separating the ingredients’ components, painting images in the liquids and topping them with the remaining powders to create a flock effect), ‘magic mushroom’ soup starter (layers of mushroom purée, stock and consommé in red-and-white toadstool caps and set in a woodland scene covered with caramelized puff-pastry leaves and brioches carved and coloured like ceps), Duck à l’Orange for the main course (duck parfait encased in orange and presented to guests in a Terry’s Chocolate Orange-style foil wrapper and box), and a chocolate waterfall (made to froth and bubble with liquid nitrogen as it flowed down edible rocks, separating into edible powder and chocolate-flavoured liquid) for dessert. It was served to celebrity guests who rapidly transformed into giggling, delighted children – a reminder of the emotional heft of food and how potent the combination of that and childhood books and memories is and surely will remain.