As someone who has been lying about being related to Roald Dahl on my résumé, I have been forced to familiarize myself with many of his classic works. One of his most beloved books is Charlie & The Chocolate Factory. And since most people think books are haunted by ghosts of nerds, it was later adapted into a beloved film and sarcastic meme factory starring Gene Wilder and Directed by Mel Stuart. Sure, it also turned out a subpar Tim Burton visual bombardment starring Johnny Depp, but the earth promised itself to forget about it lest we all start going at each other like those monkeys in 2001: A Space Odyssey. On a more positive note, it also inspired a horror/comedy themed adaptation starring Christopher Lloyd as Willy Wonka. In case you were won🅷dering if an Oompa Loompa will eat a human being, the answer isﷺ .

What we are going to concentrate on is that first film, since it is arguably the best and shaped the mind and hearts of everyone who saw it (excepඣt my dad, who oddly says he hates the movie, which totally makes me question my parentage.) And much like when you find out that most food coloring is made of crude oil, this delicious film is full of highly questionable 🦹material. Some of it you may have noticed before, since you are such a handsome and intelligence audience (please like and subscribe) but I’m next to certain I’ve managed to scrounge up some weird secrets even you all didn’t know.

27 ꦆ Very Convenient

So after Agustus Gloop gets sucked up the Gloop Tube™ the tour manages to continue, instead of everyone freaking out and calling the cops. The next stage of the tour involves them jumping into a boat to sail down the chocolate river (as one isꦺ want to do). The children’s and their irresponsible adult chauffeurs all take their seats and the adventure continues into childlike wonder and child disappearance. And the boat ride is fairly pleasant right before the nightmare tunnel, I mean the seats look comfortable enough and –wait, those seats…

There’s exactly the right number of seats.

In a perfect world where hefty German children don’t get suctioned into a dark room through a tube, the Gloop family would still be on the tour with everyone else. So the boat Wonka had ready would have some♏ empty seats... uh oh.

26 Things Get More S𒐪uspicious

Sometime later in the excitement, the children must get on yet another whimsical vehicle to get from one stupid poi🅺nt to another, the kids and their chaperones must board some fizzy device. The whole thing is a contrived way to wash everyone, which makes me think that Wonka might be a germaphobe with a very low opinion of people outsid🃏e his factory. But wait, as everyone gets into their seats, we notice that the vehicle the exact right number of seats all over again!

At this point, the disappearance count is actually higher, so there should be a plethora of empty seats if Willy was planning on using that car the whole time. So that means that he knew people would be dropping like chocolate flies along the tour, which means these are less accidents and more a candy themed version of Saw with a few cute songs.

25 Ouch

The Chocolate Room was a fairly interactive place for the actors, with many things being made of ac♏tual candy, or at least being breakable in a fun way. The Director wanted the joy and excitement the kids were displaying to be as close to genuine as possible, so if the kids had to i⛦nteract with it, it was a fun prop. Well, for the most part. There aren’t a lot of ways to make a rock fun, so they just threw some dirty old rock on the set for Veruca to back a candy against.

Unfortunately, nobody told Julie Dawn Cole, and she thought it was a soft prop. She skinned her knee pretty hard during o🐲ne of the scenes, and you can actually see her soaked sock used in some𒐪 of the scenes. A skinned knee seems like a far better fate than what would later happen to a majority of the characters.

24 That Stings 💛

The common knowledge is that everything in Hollywood is fake. The fight scenes, the explosions, the beautiful people. This extends to “kids movies (I put this in quotes because this movie is like a neon Dante’s Inferno) which seems obvious, especially in highly special effects heavy film like Willy Wonka. For example, people assume that the fﷺoam coming out 𒅌of the foam wash car thing is just foam and not an actual soap.

It definitely wasn’t soap.

In fact, it was the foam that comes out of fire extinguishers, which seems like the kind of prop that would be super handy to have on hand. Until you remember that it is a terrible irritant to human skin. Yes, the bizarre car wash scene ended up giving the cast members a gross rash and it delayed filming for a few weeks. Now you have the image of Gene Wilder covered in blisters stuck in y꧙our head.

23 Whoever Heard Of Such A ꦍThing?

The flavored wallpaper intended for nursery rooms is an incredible invention. Everyone seems to enjoy the flavor they get saddled with, although I think that’s because nobody landed on Snozzberries. Yes, Willy Wonka𒈔 states that the Snozzberries taste like Snozzberries, before being rebuked by one of the children. This prompts him to grab her face and quote Ode by Arthur O’Shaughnes🐼sy for reasons that are only clear to a purple maniac.

What the heck are Snozzberries?

For the most part, it’s a gibberish word invented by Roald Dahl. But most people assume he created the word for Charlie & The Charlie Factory when really he had a private meaning to it all along. In his 1979 work My Uncle Oswald a character states that if they grab onto a man’s snozzberry, and givﷺes it a twist, they can get them under control. Doesn’t leave much room to the imagination as to what appendage does that.

22 📖 A Geꦓnuine Reaction

The first reveal of the Chocolate Room is still a cinematic marvel. It is an enormous set filled with authentic prop pieces that still hold up scrutiny even by today’s standards. I’m somewhat jaded by today’s special effects, and I can still say I’m impressed, so I can’t imagine what the minds of people from 1971 were thinking. On top of that, the acting from every single actor is impeccable;𓂃 with everyone reacting as if this was the first time they had seen such a wonderful room.

I guess with a sentence like that previous one, you can probably guess that it was a genuine reaction from the actors. They had never seen the room before at the Director’s behest. He wanted the actors to look exactly as the audience would, with incredulity tha⛎t anyone would bꦍe able to create something so vibrant and all-encompassing. It’s a pretty brilliant decision.

21 🌠 Genuin🍒e Fear

Obviously, that biz🐭zarro tunnel scene is going to come up, because it is a moment of sheer terror in an otherwise lighthearted movie about children being mangled beyond recognition. Willy Wonka just takes these kids on a boat ride through a hellish landscape where people have bugs on their face and lights give anyone looking at them seizures. The kids and adults🍬 alike realize they have made a grave error in coming here, something they should have realized when a man thought it would be a funny prank to fake his own health conditions.

That’s actual terror on their faces.

It should come as no surprise at this point that the actors were not warned ahead of time what was going to happen in🐠 the tunnel. Many of the kids believed that Gene Wilder had genuinely lost his mind, which is actually kind of his gimmick, he does it all the time.

20 𝓀 You Get Nothing!

Right near the end of the film, Charlie is looking to claim his grand prize, which I think he deserves for st൲aying quiet about Wonka’s House of Horrors. At this brilliant moment, Willy freaks out and just unloads on Charlie, chewing him out for stealing Fizzy Lifting Drink. I get that it was a morality thing and he wanted to see who actually deserved the factory, but you can see actual heartbreak in Charlie’s face.

Can you guess why?

There was a running theme of not telling the actors what nightmare was coming up for them, so of course, the actor who played Charlie was never warned that he was about to be yelled at. This really upset Gene Wilder, since he had become friends with the child over the course of filming, and desperately wanted to tell him that he w👍asn’t genuinely mad at the boy. The director forbid it.

19 🌸 Never To Be Seen𝄹 Again

Peter Ostrum, who played Charlie Bucket in the film, did a pretty convincing job of a luckless kid suddenly falling head over heels into a world of delight and child endangerment. Many people around Hollywood thought he would be the next big star, hoping to see more of the boy who inherited a factory. He was charming and cute and seemed to have something of a range. So why haven’t we all seen more of him sinc♉e then?

That was his only movie.

Unsurprisingly, not being told that you are about to be scared witless multiple times during a film shoot doesn’t leave a good impression of what acting is all about. Peter decided that acting just simply isn’t for him, and walked away from it all. Judging by what you hear from countless other child stars, th🤪at may have been the smartest move of his entire career. Oh well.

18 🃏 The Superhero Treatment

In the original film, Charlie lives with his bedridden Grandparents and his mom and…that’s it. For some reason, his father is no longer with us. This isn’t even a part of the source material, Charlie totally lives with his dad too, who works in a toothpaste factory. Which means, sadly, t♏hat somehow Tim Burton was slightly more accurate, at least in this one regard. And his depiction of the squirrel room vs. the depiction of a golden goose room. The book only had squirrels. But I digress.

What is the point of making Charlie without a father? Was it too much for delicate 1970s minds to depict a down and out family without also having them be missing a father figure?📖 Or did they think this created a more tragic figure, as if living in a leaking house with a destitute family wasn’t downtrodden enough? Or maybe they were just big fans of comic book heroes (who are all orphaned.)