ONE NIGHT THE OOMPA LOOMPAS GRABBED ALL THE SHOES ... "Hey, you should read this thing on Reddit," is probably the laziest from of blogging I've got, but Paris Themmen, who played Mike Teevee in the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, did an AMA this week, and, yeah:
Milo_K: Hi Mr Themmen. Do you have any views on Mr Wonka's ethics during the factory tour? Did it annoy you that Mike never got a chance to give back the Ever Lasting Gobstopper?
ParisThemmenAMA: Okay, that's an interesting one. Because Charlie and Grandpa Joe bounced around the Fizzy Lifting Drinks ceiling prior to Mike's indiscretions in the TV room, it has been suggested that I should have won the contest (I was the last to go before Charlie). No one has ever pointed out to me before that I never had the opportunity to return the Gobstopper. The Gobstopper, by now, would have been a couple of microns tall. In my opinion, the whole thing was rigged from the beginning. Charlie even lives in Wonka's town! The fix was in.
I am strongly of the opinion that the movie (because of the Fizzy Lifting Drinks scene) dramatically overthrows the ethics of the book and is the worse for it. The whole moral of the book is that because Charlie is better than the other kids, he gets rewarded with something valuable. (Something that happens in many of Roald Dahl's books.)
ReplyDeleteDon't get me wrong; the movie is still great, but that scene makes it so much less cohesive.