History Headscratchers / CharlieAndTheChocolateFactory

*** Let's face it: the Oompa-Loompas are a bunch of '''very weird, very creepy little people'''. They're so off-putting, Wonka held off revealing their very existence to the general public for years. Even the most intelligent, composed and even cultured Oompah would just look be a off-putting, monsterish freak to the bulk of Wonka's customer base and general society. No way any of them could serve effectively as the face of the company.

** Perhaps the TV transmitted chocolate is an "on-demand" thing: a customer enters an order for a chocolate bar, pays for it either ahead of time (or later), and is given the channel and time (or at least a reasonable window) as to when the commercial with the bar will be televised, so they can reach out and claim it. This troper wouldn't put it past Wonka's genius to be able to work the system so that only the people he designates (paying customers) would be able to grab the candy.

** Perhaps the TV transmitted chocolate was an "on-demand" thing: a customer enters an order for a chocolate bar, pays for it either ahead of time (or later), and is given the channel and time (or at least a reasonable window) as to when the commercial with the bar will be televised, so they can reach out and claim it. This troper wouldn't put it past Wonka's genius to be able to work the system so that only the people he designates (paying customers) would be able to grab the candy.

** A lot of businesses follow this naming scheme, as it's a holdover from ''when they started'', an ArtifactTitle if you will. For example, we have Cheesecake Factory, which is mostly a restaurant (they do have freezer desserts you can buy at Target)but when they first started, they were a wholesale bakery that made desserts for other stores, a "factory" in a sense (Fun fact: Cheesecake Factory started in 1972, a year after ''[=WW&tCF=]'' was released).

* Why was Veruca's father the only parent that got a punishment? He sure was taking her to be the person she is, but every other parent was that to their kids too and the punishments for them were running after their kids. Also, he didn´t even mean to make her obnoxious and dominant, he just wanted to make her happy, although he did it in the wrong, material way. Violet's mother was far worse, probably forcing her daughter into that hobby.

* Did anyone else feel that Veruca's punishment was ''far'' too light? She was arguably the most obnoxious child in the group, yet she was the only one whose punishment didn't leave drastic, lasting effects. To wit: Augustus gets (presumably) turned into ''living chocolate'', and will have to spend the rest of his life trying to keep from eating himself or melting; Violet is left blue-skinned and freakishly flexible (and permanently doing cartwheels, it seems); Mikey is turned into a freakishly tall [[NoodlePeople noodle person]]; Veruca... gets a bath and a stern look from her father.

** The meta ([[WatsonianVersusDoylist Doylist]] reason is that Dahl lived and wrote in the United Kingdom, where 'candy' is not used frequently as a term for confectionary (in Britain they tend to be called 'sweets'). Presumably, he thought 'chocolate' worked better in the title than ''Charlie and the Sweet Factory'' or ''Charlie and the Confectionary Factory''.
*** Note also that Dahl's specific inspiration for the story came from his own life, where as a boy at the
[[UsefulNotes/BritishEducationSystem private school]] Repton he and other young pupils were occasionally used as beta-testers by the chocolatiers Cadbury (still the UK's best-known confectioners even today) -- they would be sent boxes of prototype new chocolates to taste and rate. This sparked a lifelong love of the stuff, and made him dream of inventing his own chocolate bar that would win the praise of Mr Cadbury: something that ultimately provoked the book. And Cadbury's real-life works is very definitely a ''chocolate factory''.

*** There's an odd bit of transatlantic fudge[[note]](no pun intended... mmm, fudge)[[/note]] going on for the location of the sequel book, though. At some point between the two books, Dahl (and/or his publishers) seems to have 'leaned in' to this business of cultural translation, and appears to have shifted the setting canonically Stateside. The second book's titular decive is named the Great Glass '''Elevator''' even in its UK version. The super-aged Grandma Georgina has also sailed on the ''Mayflower'', and although her spiel about "the dirty British" etc is not present in the British text, she flips straight from exclaiming "Did you hear the news! Admiral Nelson has beaten the French at Trafalgar!" to "Gettysbury! General Lee is on the run!", to lamenting the death of Lincoln.
*** As a spin-off from the above, certain sections of the text will have been updated over the years, in either market, to keep things like the amounts of money mentioned relatively up to date -- for instance, as also noted above, a 1970s/'80s UK version of the first book will have Grandpa Joe slipping Charlie a [[UsefulNotes/OldBritishMoney pre-decimal sixpence]] but Charlie subsequently finds a (decimal) 50-pence piece... which would not have existed when the book was originally written in the early '60s. Meanwhile, doing the arithmetic with the numbers the characters use to calculate Georgina's suddenly incredibly advanced age in the aforementioned scene (they work out she was now born about six years pre-''Mayflower'', i.e. 1614, and is thus "358") places their 'present day' in the second book at c.1972.
*** The film takes a book by a British author (but also widely loved in America), but the movie is made in the US and is aimed perhaps primarily at the lucrative domestic Stateside market... and in a nod to all of that casts predominantly British and Irish actors alongside an American Wonka, while having the ostensibly British characters use oddly American terminology. It therefore ends up plonking its locale down squarely in the middle of Transatlantica, where the contradictory elements of the setting seem to make it 'either' or, perhaps intentionally, an impossible-to-resolve 'neither'. Even the vehicles leaving the factory in the opening scene pull out straight down the middle of the road!

*** Yes, Wonka points out (fairly enough) that things appear vastly smaller on a TV screen than they are in real life. Therefore, by the irrefutable InsaneTrollLogic apparently at work in his world, you have to start off with a gigantic chocolate bar if you want it to (literally) come out 'normal'-sized at the receiving end, as a normal-sized one would come out absolutely miniscule.

** You might be forgetting that Wonka built the palace thinking the prince was going to eat it. He didn't reveal he wanted to live in it until after it had been built.

** Also, Dahl lived and wrote in the United Kingdom, where 'candy' is not used frequently as a term for confectionary (in Britain they tend to be called 'sweets'). Presumably, he thought 'chocolate' worked better in the title than ''Charlie and the Sweets Factory'' or ''Charlie and the Confectionary Factory''.
*** A lot of businesses follow this naming scheme, as it's a holdover from ''when they started'', an ArtifactTitle if you will. For example, we have Cheesecake Factory, which is mostly a restaurant (they do have freezer desserts you can buy at Target)but when they first started, they were a wholesale bakery that made desserts for other stores, a "factory" in a sense (Fun fact: Cheesecake Factory started in 1972, a year after ''[=WW&tCF=]'' was released).

* In the sequel- which is set in the 1970s, as the characters mention- they're building a space hotel, and ordinary people are going to stay there. Um, how are they going to get there? Send the guests up to three at a time in Apollo capsules?

** A lot of people in the 1960s assumed that space flight technology would keep right on developing, and did not foresee the long periods of stagnation we've seen since. If they'd been right, it would have been at least possible to get tourists into a space hotel using reusable [=SSTOs=] or something by the late '70s or early '80s. Tickets might have been a hundred thousand dollars a person or more, but it would have been ''possible''.

*** The same would have happened with Charlie for whatever happened. Try swimming after Agustus despite probably having no swim lessons. He would have been likely pulled under by the fat boy or would have been sent up the pipe (in the book version) and processed quickly. Violet? Might be tossed into a table or experiments, caused her to swallow the gum, or be bitten as the Oompa Loompas add verses to their song about not sticking his hand where it shouldn't belong. Mike? Only part of them are sent over or they are fused. The book mentioned that he avoided playing to preserve what little energy his body had and it does him well here. Naivety or white knighting might be his fault otherwise.

*** The same would have happened with Charlie for whatever happened. Try swimming after Agustus despite probably having no swim lessons. He would have been likely pulled under by the fat boy or would have been sent up the pipe (in the book version) and processed quickly. Veruca? Might be tossed into a table or experiments, caused her to swallow the gum, or be bitten as the Oompa Loompas add verses to their song about not sticking his hand where it shouldn't belong. Mike? Only part of them are sent over or they are fused. The book mentioned that he avoided playing to preserve what little energy his body had and it does him well here. Naivety or white knighting might be his fault otherwise.

* During the song about Veruca, how and why do the Oompa-Loompas have a portrait of Mrs. Salt, to begin with? I get that its presence symbolically represents Mrs. Salt's fate in the book and that she is responsible as well for Veruca's brattiness, but she doesn't go to the factory and the Oompa-Loompas didn't know Mr. Salt until he and Veruca arrived with the other winners. Do they have portraits of all other parents?
** Everyone who found a ticket appeared extensively in the news, apart from Charlie who didn't show up publicly with his ticket in time for the reporters to descend. Photos of the parents of all the other kids were likely featured in plenty of magazines and papers, so they knew what Mrs. Salt looked like and prepared a suitable portrait.

* Why did the other kids hate Charlie? Why did Violet and Veruca hate each other? Why did Violet and Veruca pretend to be friends?
** Violet was shown to be very competitive, Veruca was a spoiled brat who probably didn't like the idea that other people were sharing the prize with her. They didn't like each other in the first movie either. As for the rest of it... I don't know either.
** The other kids are mean to Charlie because they're the kind of nasty little children who will pick on anyone they see as weaker. None of the kids liked each other, but Violet and Veruca especially disliked each other because they knew who the real competition was for the "special prize." And they pretended to be friends because, like many popular and entitled girls, they understood the concept of keeping one's enemies close.
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