YMMV / Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

• Adaptation Displacement: Especially in the United States, this film is more familiar to many people than the source book — to the point that there were complaints about the 2005 film making stuff up when what it was actually doing was restoring things that were in the book but left out or changed for the 1971 film. The 2013 British stage musical adaptation of the novel worked "Pure Imagination" into the otherwise all-new score upon realizing some Pandering to the Base was necessary, and the subsequent Broadway Retool in 2017 worked in even more movie songs.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Was Wonka's infamous rant (under Memetic Mutation) an Out-of-Character Moment, or a subconscious Berserk Button, or just disappointment that Charlie was as selfish as the others? Alternately was it merely a Batman Gambit to finalise Charlie as a responsible owner (and that, unlike the others, he could accept and learn from his flaws)? Wonka's fondness for Chewing the Scenery and faux concern and emotion doesn't help the least.
  • Some people think Grandpa Joe is a creep. He says that he'd help Charlie support the family if he could get out of bed, but the only time we actually see him trying is so he can go to the chocolate factory, where he sings I've Got a Golden Ticket about his grandson's find. Him taking the fizzy lifting drinks and willingness to sell out to Slugworth after Wonka's rant are also sometimes held against him (although the last one he was angry at Wonka for crushing Charlie, but understood why Charlie couldn't do it). RedLetterMedia points out that even at the end, when Charlie is being given the greatest opportunity a little boy could want that will secure him a bright and happy future, Grandpa Joe's only question is how it will benefit him.
    • Alternatively, was Joe simply depressed, rather than infirm, that the only thing that was able to give him enough hope to get out of bed was the once-in-a-lifetime Golden Ticket opportunity?
  • Also, Grandpa Joe accuses Mr. Wonka of being an inhuman monster for crushing Charlie's dream. Justified with them not knowing that it was a test. (Gene Wilder overselling his false anger and coming off as a Jerkass when he berates Charlie with everyone's favorite meme doesn't help matters.)
  • Is Charlie really any better than the other kids and does he deserve to get the factory at the end? He commits the exact same transgression they do, disobeying Wonka's orders in trying the fizzy lifting drinks. The only difference between Charlie and the other children is that he managed to get out of trouble on his own and before the others found him, even though Wonka called him out in the end. And although he gives his gobstopper back to Wonka rather than sell it to Slugworth, who's to say the other children wouldn't have done the same if they had the opportunity? While we see that Charlie is better behaved than the other children, there isn't much that makes him more worthy of inheriting the factory than his competitors, he's just a bit luckier and more clever than them, traits that Wonka never brings up.
  • The mysterious Tinker in the beginning of the movie - who utters an ominous warning to Charlie that nobody comes in or out of the factory - is a down-and-out Slugworth.
  • Did Wonka know that each segment of his factory would eliminate a troublesome child and deliberately put them in danger? Each time a new vehicle appeared, it was smaller than the last. Renegade Cut goes so far as to suggest Wonka is actually a child murderer.
    • Some even interpret Willy Wonka as a sociopath who endangered the lives of his factory's guests, especially children, to prevent them from spilling trade secrets.
  • Mr. Salt's incongruously cheerful attitude when he asks Wonka where Veruca has gone after she falls down the garbage chute, and his fit of giggling at the thought that Veruca will be "sizzled like a sausage." Is it hysteria over his daughter's possible fate? Does he think Wonka is joking about the incinerator until he realizes he’s not? Or is he actually relieved to be rid of the little brat, only faking desperation to save her after Wonka reveals she could be stuck in the chute?
  • Film Theory hypothesizes that the whole golden ticket contest was just Wonka's attempt to offload the horrifically unsafe factory before OSHA, established that same year, hit him with millions of dollars in fines. Even Robot Chicken had parodied this theory.
  • One viewer makes a rather solid case for Violet being the best candidate to take over the factory, positing that her willfulness, competitiveness, obsession with candy, and neglect for social norms function as strengths rather than weaknesses. She basically is Willy Wonka.
  • There's a fairly common fan theory that Wonka is some kind of Satanic Archetype for various reasons. Mainly, all of the bad kids have a problem with one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and Wonka uses this to tempt them into ruin. While he also tempts Charlie, Charlie doesn't succumb (due to being the good kid). This post talks about this theory in great detail, including claiming the Oompa Loompas are really some kind of demons.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Grandpa Joe asks what the Oompa Loompas are putting in the Wonkamobile. Wonka rattles off different names of soda, some real, some fictional. One, Double Cola, is a real brand of soda.
• Audience-Coloring Adaptation: The film has become so iconic and parodied that outside of the U.K. — and especially in the United States — the novel has suffered Adaptation Displacement. This is why Tim Burton's 2005 adaptation has become more polarizing, as it is sometimes seen as a poorly-done remake of the film rather than a faithful retelling of the novel. There are actually many other adaptations of it out there, but old-time fans tend to bristle at any telling that doesn't slavishly follow the lead of the original film, never mind that said tellings are usually Truer to the Text (the 2013 stage musical was heavily retooled for its 2017 Broadway run to work in more film-specific material for this reason). Dahl himself disowned the film, so he likely wouldn't be happy about this at all. Some of the changes were "corrected" in the 2005 version — the Oompa-Loompas changing back from orange-faced, green-haired clowns to dark-skinned jungle natives — but others were not.
  • One good example is how the characters' nationalities are presented. Willy Wonka is British in the book, but American in the movie. Conversely: Veruca Salt and her family are American in the book, but British in the movie. Augustus Gloop and his family are likely British (or East Coast American) in the book, but German in the movie. And Charlie and his family are implied to be British in the book, but definitively American in the movie. Notably, even the 2005 film (which otherwise sold itself as being more faithful to the book than the 1971 film) kept most of these changes, only making Charlie and his family British again. And even Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (the sequel to the original book) followed the movie's lead by retconning Charlie and his family as Americans.
• Award Snub: Not only did the film lose the Academy Award for Best Original Song Score or Adaptation Score, but it wasn't nominated for Best Art Direction or Original Song for "Pure Imagination."
• Awesome Music:
  • "Pure Imagination". It warrants its own article at Wikipedia which lists many of the cover versions, variations, and repurposings it's had over the years.
  • The other songs on the soundtrack are quite popular as well, with "The Candyman" probably coming in behind Pure Imagination for the most beloved of the lot. Sammy Davis Jr. was originally cast as the titular candy man but was dropped because the producers wanted no-names in all the roles save Wilder's. Still, he fell in love with the number and turned it into his Signature Song.
  • "I Want It Now" is an insanely memorable Villain Song that proves that, even as a child, Julie Dawn Cole had quite the singing chops.
  • The music that plays when Charlie opens the Wonka bar containing the Golden Ticket sets the stage for the suspense, satisfaction and fulfillment. The string tremolos and woodwind vibratos when Charlie peels away at the foil, the piccolo flourish when he sees the gold and the brass fanfare to the tune of "I've Got a Golden Ticket" when he holds the ticket up capture the scene beautifully.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The tunnel scene, which comes and then is never mentioned again, even though realistically such an event would likely cause the characters to demand to be let out of this factory. It's also a Disney Acid Sequence, total Nightmare Fuel, and, ironically, probably the movie's most famous scene.
  • The Wonkamobile scene doesn't advance the plot. The guests get messy, and then they get clean, and then they go to the next scene and unlike the tunnel which could be excused as physically taking them to their next stop, the Wonkamobile never even leaves the same room.
  • The many scenes that show how desperate the world is in finding the Golden Tickets, though slightly brief, seem to drag a little and might come off as this to some. Particularly the kidnapped husband scene with drags on for several minutes for a single punchline.
• Broken Aesop: The song where the Oompa-Loompa's lecture Augustus for eating too much candy rings a bit hollow considering they work for a candy company and thus depend on people like him for revenue.
• Broken Base: Fans of the book cannot decide which version is the superior adaption, this or the 2005 film. This production invokes more nostalgia, deviates from the book, and takes more risks with mixed results. Whereas the 2005 film follows much more closely to Roald Dahl's work, many perceive it as a soul-less parade of neverending, exceedingly weird imagery (it IS a Tim Burton film, after all!) which ruins Wonka's mysterious character with a forced Daddy Issues-themed backstory.
• Can't Un-Hear It: Gene Wilder is the definitive Willy Wonka.
• Common Knowledge: A number of fans and critics decried Burton's film for the unforgivable "alteration" of making the other children's fates known to the viewer. There is a widespread perception that the classic film left their ultimate endings ambiguous, even implying that they all died. Not only is this not an alteration from the original text (there's an entire chapter called "The Other Children Go Home"), it's not even an alteration from the first film, where Wonka tells Charlie the other children will be fine, but hopefully a little wiser. While one could read the scene as Wonka lying to Charlie (this Wonka is more duplicitous and untrustworthy than other incarnations), that's still an Alternative Character Interpretation at best.
• Covered Up:
  • "The Rowing Song", whose cover as "Prelude (The Family Trip)" was made a bit more disturbing by Marilyn Manson (who also paid homage to the Wonkatania scene in his "Dope Hat" video).
  • "The Candy Man" became a huge hit and Signature Song for Sammy Davis Jr..
• Crazy Is Cool: Almost all of the characters are overshadowed by Willy Wonka himself in the latter half of the film, due to his over-the-top inventions, sardonic sense of humor, and a legendary performance by the late Gene Wilder.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The kids suffering terrible accidents in Willy Wonka's factory? Frightening. Willy Wonka's reacting nonchalantly and snarkily to these accidents? Some of the funniest moments in the movie.
• Delusion Conclusion: Some viewers believe that the fantastical events of the film are just Charlie Bucket's dream of what it might be like inside Willy Wonka's famous factory. Apparently, the inclusion of magical confectionery was considered too farfetched after spending the first third of the movie on a relatively realistic setting, given that the film did not adapt the original novel's fantastical elements taking place outside the factory, like Prince Pondicherry's chocolate palace. Consequently, Wonka's musical number "Pure Imagination" was believed to be a hidden clue that Charlie - impoverished, depressed and desperate to make a better life for his family - dreamed up his discovery of a golden ticket and everything that followed.
• Designated Hero: By association with Charlie, Grandpa Joe is presented in the movie as a sympathetic character and a good grandfather, who doesn't enable flaws in his child companion like the other adults. However, as mentioned above, he can be seen as kind of a dick who makes things harder on his family than necessary, and unlike the other parents who just sat back and allowed their children to be rotten, Grandpa Joe is the one who pushes Charlie to disobey and drink the Fizzy Lifting Drink despite seeing how the other children who ignored Wonka's instructions got into life threatening situations. This comes back to bite him twice, once when they get almost sliced up by the fan and then when Wonka yells at Charlie and refuses to give him his reward.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Veruca is probably the most remembered character aside from Mr. Wonka and the Oompa Loompas, thanks to her hamminess.
  • Movie-Augustus seems to be well-liked by viewers since he seems to be the nicest of the "four bad kids," even being friendly towards Charlie. It probably helps that he's "killed" off first, meaning we don't get to see him acting like a brat like the other three kids.
  • Mr. Turkentine, Charlie's science teacher, is a very beloved character in the fandom for being a closeted Mad Scientist, being weirdly obsessed with Wonka, and providing some of the most memorable lines in the movie.
• Fandom Rivalry: Between the fans of this movie and those who prefer the 2005 film. Fans of the Burton film and Roald Dahl purists don't think very highly of the Stuart film, perceiving it as a barely faithful take on Dahl's book which takes way too many liberties with the source material and is filled with overly corny musical numbers that don't help to advance the plot at all and just pad the runtime (specially Charlie's mom and Grandfather's numbers). The fact that Dahl himself as well as Tim Burton have expressed their distaste with the 1971 movie is commonly cited as well. While fans of the Stuart film do recognize the Burton film is more accurate to the book, they feel it just doesn't evoke the same sense of wonder and amazement as the 1971 movie, has a particularly unlikable portrayal of Willy Wonka and is dragged down by a forced Daddy Issues conflict regarding Wonka and his father, Wilbur that just magically solves itself at the end. That said, there is a subset of fans who appreciate both films equally.
• Fanon: Julie Dawn Cole revealed during the DVD commentary that she's had multiple people ask her if Wonka dramatically addressing Charlie as "My boy!" before telling him he's won was supposed to be a Luke, I Am Your Father reveal.
• Genius Bonus:
  • After Wonka plays the musical lock, Mrs. Teavee says "Rachmaninoff" smugly, which is met by a confused double-take by Mr. Salt. The joke is that the music is actually from the overture to Mozart's opera Le nozze di Figaro and Mrs. Teavee is a Know-Nothing Know-It-All, a rather obscure reference to non-musicians/opera fans.
  • The man from Paraguay who gets caught counterfeiting a Golden Ticket is represented by a picture of Martin Bormann, the former chairman of the Nazi Party, who at the time was widely believed to be living under an assumed name in South America.^note The remains of Bormann - who never left Berlin and was buried there - were discovered in 1973. In retrospect, a better choice might have been Josef Mengele, who had escaped to South America, where he was living under an assumed name until his death in 1979 — but it's unlikely the studio would have approved such (Mengele was a psychopath who experimented on living people).
  • After Veruca Salt says she wants one of Wonka's gold-egg-laying geese, she starts to sing "I Want It Now," and the first thing she wants in the song is a "Bean Feast". This is the British name for a celebratory party that used to have a bean-goose as the centerpiece. So essentially Veruca's song was her demanding a party with a Punny Name to show off her newest acquisition.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In one scene where Charlie and Grandpa Joe open a chocolate bar in the hopes of finding a ticket only to turn up empty, Charlie laments that they probably "make the chocolate taste terrible". As fate would have it, the real Wonka bars being sold at the time of the movie's release were eventually recalled and discontinued due to them apparently tasting bad and melting on the store shelves.
  • Also, the scene where Mike eats exploding candy and is blown back by the blast but is otherwise ok aside from implied minor teeth damage, and Wonka saying that "it's still too weak." It wouldn't be so funny anymore considering what happened with the Exploding Jawbreaker incident where a girl tried to eat a jawbreaker under heated pressure and it exploded, inflicting serious burns on her face. Mythbusters would later test this to prove just how lethal exploding candy can be.
  • Wonka's line "I can't go on forever, and I don't really want to try" may come off as more of a Tear Jerker moment for some fans since Gene Wilder's death.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Despite being known as "the amazing chocolatier", the most popular defictionalized Wonka-brand candy is fruit flavored, like Runts and Nerds (especially the banana Runts- fans apparently lobby Wonka all the time for a banana-only box). You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who's eaten a Wonka bar, and the other candy mentioned in the book, the Everlasting Gobstopper, seems to have seriously dipped in popularity since the 1990s. There were a few candy bars, all from 1999-2010. They were: the original Wonka Bar, which had graham crackers; the Xploder Bar, with Pop Rocks; Wonka Donutz (exactly what it sounds like); and the Wonka Exceptionals line of upscale treats (Brits got even more varieties- including every single type of Wonka bar seen in the 2005 film adaption). The latest ones seem truer to the books though. They are actually chocolate, for one thing.
  • Later in her acting career, Julie Dawn Cole appeared in the ensemble of the 1983 British stage musical Bashville (an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's The Admirable Bashville). The title character was played by Douglas Hodge...who, 30 years later, originated the role of Willy Wonka in the 2013 stage musical adaptation of this story, which includes several internal homages to, and one song from, this film.
  • The Crunchtastic term "scrumdiddlyumptious" now sounds like something Ned Flanders might come up with!
    • Ned actually does say "scrumdiddlyumptious" during a Treehouse of Horror episode to describe the doughnut that Homer sold his soul for. There's also a voice clip of Ned saying that in the Simpsons Cartoon Studio PC game.
  • After the boat ride, Mike asks "why don't they show stuff like that on TV?" — a line that sounds even truer now that some TV prints cut out the boat ride. Speaking of that scene, Wonka's deranged wail at the end of his song is a bit similar to R2-D2's panicked scream in Star Wars, as well as 4chan's "REEEEEEE" meme.
  • Charlie guesses Golden Tickets "make the chocolate taste terrible". The 2005 film portrays Augustus Gloop taking a bite of his ticket along with the chocolate bar and thus able to tell if they really "make the chocolate taste terrible".
• Hype Backlash: The film is hailed as a classic yet takes several creative liberties with the source material, so this was inevitable. Even when the movie was released it angered many fans with its changes to the story and tone, even Roald Dahl himself. This has gotten more prevalent as time wore on with less and less people growing up with this movie and instead with other adaptations.
• Inferred Holocaust: Unlike the original book, this adaptation doesn't show the bratty kids making it out of the factory. Wonka assures Charlie that they were all fine, but given Wonka has also been shown to be an Unreliable Expositor, some fans theorise that he's just sugarcoating it for Charlie's sake.
• Jerkass Woobie: Mr. Salt. Did he and his wife spoil Veruca? You bet. Are they responsible for her monstrous personality? No doubt. Even knowing this, does the look on his face when she calls him a "rotten mean father" (as though he were about to burst into tears) make you feel legitimately bad for the guy? Absolutely. What's even worse is that he knows all too well that spoiling Veruca is a bad idea, but he can't do anything about it because he can't get through to his daughter and his wife insists on giving Veruca whatever she wants.
• Karmic Overkill: Are the four kids brats who need an attitude adjustment? Probably. Do they deserve to suffer near death experiences just because they acted out and disobeyed Willy Wonka? Probably not. Some, like Violet and Augustus weren't all that bad aside from their vices.
• Love to Hate: Veruca is every single negative trait of a Spoiled Brat-screaming, violent, manipulative-rolled into one girl and played to perfection. She even gets a great Villain Song to boot.
• Magnificent Bastard: Willy Wonka himself is an eccentric, whimsical trickster of an entrepreneur whose candy company has given him an admirable reputation worldwide. Able to create wondrous confections with use of state-of-the-art technology and his army of well-compensated workers the Oompa Loompas, Wonka puts forth a contest for the world to find five Golden Tickets hidden inside his candy, raking in a fortune from the ensuing sales before inviting the five children who locate the tickets to his Chocolate Factory. Taking the children and their guardians on a magically dangerous journey through the strange factory, Wonka tempts each of the children with their vices then sits back and watches as they endanger themselves by toying with Wonka's creations, all to narrow down the winners until only Charlie remains. After putting Charlie through a final, brutal test of moral character, Wonka reveals he planned the entire day to find a proper heir to his candy empire and hands the keys over to Charlie, promising the boy that he and his family will live happily ever after inside the Chocolate Factory.
• Memetic Molester: The Candy Man... the Candy Man can? Seriously, kids, haven't you learned not to take candy from strangers? Why can't he just sell them and be done with it? No, he has to practically seduce these kids with sugar and dance around them very suspiciously. Michael Bolton parodied this during his appearance in Screen Junkies' Honest Trailer for this movie:
  Who seems like a nice guy, giving treats to you,
  Never asks for money, just a creepy hug or two?
  The creepy man! The creepy man can, 'cause he's got a white van with even more candy!
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Wait a Minute, Strike That! Reverse It! Thank You!" ^ExplanationWonka misspeaks "We have so much time and so little to do", and uses this Verbal Backspace. So much so, that it became a song in the Broadway version.
  • "YOU GET NOTHING!" YOU LOSE! GOOD DAY, SIR!" ^ExplanationWonka angrily tells Charlie and Grandpa Joe that they broke their contract by stealing Fizzy Lifting Drinks and thus can't receive their lifetime supply of chocolate. His rant ends with this phrase. In 2024, the disastrous "Willy's Chocolate Experience" in Glasgow, an unauthorised "Wonka-themed" event in Glasgow featuring a few props scattered in a warehouse, AI-generated advertisements and backdrops, and no actual chocolate to be found, led to people calling the police and the event being cancelled halfway through the first day, and resulted in a resurgence of this phrase to suit people's frustrations with how incredibly little the event offered.
  • The "Condescending Wonka" snark humor account on Twitter has grown popular as well and is often used to point out hypocrisy, a.k.a. tu quoque (Latin). It's commonly used in the "You Must Be New Here" meme.◊
  • There's also Wonka's half-hearted "Stop. Don't. Come back"◊, which is semi-frequently posted on message boards in response to posters angrily threatening to leave discussions after arguments.
  • As mentioned in Alternative Character Interpretation, turning Grandpa Joe into Ron the Death Eater has been subject to this.
  • "Charlie is a ladies' man".^ExplanationBecause Denise Nickerson (Violet's actress) and Julie Dawn Cole (Veruca's actress) both had crushes on Peter Ostrum (Charlie's actor), it became very popular for fans to joke about Charlie being a Chick Magnet.
• Memetic Psychopath:
  • Jokes have been made about Willy Wonka being this, but it pales in comparison to the amount of jokes made about the Oompa Loompas dancing and singing as a child dies horribly.
  • Grandpa Joe is already characterized by the fandom as a jobless deadbeat who faked having a disability to get out of working, only dropping the facade for a fun chocolate factory tour. Some take it a step further by speculating that he spends what little money the Bucket family has on cocaine and hookers and that he enjoys keeping his family in poverty For the Evulz. Some exaggerate it even further by theorizing that he was the mastermind behind numerous historical atrocities.
• Misaimed Merchandising: It is a testament to viewers' love for this kid-oriented movie extending well past their childhoods that WMS Gaming brought out a video slot machine themed to it in 2013. It's proven popular enough to have follow-ups.
• Mis-blamed: Many of the people who vilify Grandpa Joe for not going out and finding some kind of employment since the family was struggling so badly and he was clearly able-bodied enough to leap out of bed the second he was given the chance to tour a chocolate factory are often missing an important piece of historical context about society during the time of the movie's production. The common mindset at the time toward the elderly was something known as "disengagement theory," which believed that the elderly should begin separating and withdrawing from society as a preparation for death. One way this was enforced was with "mandatory retirement," where people were (often by law) either fired or forced to resign from their jobs when they reached a certain age, often 65 (Maggie Kuhn founded the Gray Panthers to combat this kind of age discrimination after she was forcibly removed from her job in the Presbyterian Church the year before the movie was released.) So, while Grandpa Joe might have been physically able to work to support his family, the possibility is open that he simply might not have been able to find anybody who would (or legally could) hire him to do so.
• My Real Daddy: Roald Dahl's original screenplay was a fairly straightforward adaptation of his original novel, with most of the new elements being added by David Seltzer in his uncredited rewrite. To those fans who consider this the definitive version of the story, Seltzer usually falls under this trope, possibly along with director Mel Stuart.
• Nausea Fuel: Mrs. Gloop is very disgusted when she sees the "chocolate waterfall":
  Mrs. Gloop: What a disgusting, dirty river!
  Mr. Salt: Industrial waste, that. You've ruined your watershed, Wonka; it's polluted.
  Wonka: It's chocolate.
  Veruca Salt: That's chocolate?
  • The chocolate river was made from 150,000 gallons of water, real chocolate and cream. The cream began to spoil and, by the end of filming, smelled terrible. The exterior of the factory was Munich Gas Works.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Many people attribute Wonka's many literary quotes to this film.
  • Wonka's off-hand reference to "Vermcious Knids" being one of the predators which live in Oompa-Loompa Land might sound like the movie's creators cribbed the name from the initial threat faced by Wonka, Charlie, and the Bucket family in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. However, Great Glass Elevator wasn't released until the year after this movie, and Vermcious Knids were first mentioned in James and the Giant Peach.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Several examples during the worldwide scramble for the Golden Tickets, but the standout is probably British comic actor Tim Brooke-Taylor (from At Last the 1948 Show and The Goodies) as a... peeved... computer operator.
  • David Battley as the teacher Mr. Turkentine... who can't seem to do a lick of math. The director mentioned that Battley's part was originally going to be very small, but was expanded slightly because he did such a wonderful job.
  • The Half Room, Wonka's office, is a visual treat. Wonka's balancing on half a chair, retrieves papers from half a safe, even the wallpaper is in half strips. (It even comes into play during the emotional climax; when Wonka is angrily reading back the fine print of the contract Charlie signed, he interjects et cetera, et cetera! every couple of words because the copy of the document is also in half!)
  • The fraudulent Latin American "winner" of the last Golden Ticket being Nazi German official Martin Bormman is this for history nerds, with the implication being that he was living in Paraguay under a false name to escape justice given that the movie was made before his remains were found. Why he's come out of hiding to win the Chocolate factory for some reason is another source of humor and fan theories all around.
• Protagonist Title Fallacy: As noted on the main page, the title was changed for several reasons, but Charlie is still the protagonist. Willy Wonka isn't seen until the halfway point.
• Retroactive Recognition: One of the Oompa Loompas is played by Malcolm Dixon, who’s best known for playing Strutter from Time Bandits and Leektar from Return of the Jedi.
• Ron the Death Eater:
  • Grandpa Joe. In the film, he's portrayed as a kindly old man and sort of a mentor figure to Charlie. The fandom, however, portrays him as a cabbage water-guzzling deadbeat who faked having a disability and never lifted a finger to help his starving family despite being perfectly able to, only finally climbing out of bed when a day of chocolate and fun is involved. People also take issue that Grandpa Joe, who stayed in bed for two decades, got to go to the factory instead of the hard-working Mrs. Bucket. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory rectifies this by establishing that Grandpa Joe worked at Wonka's factory before Wonka laid off his entire workforce, and was unable to find further employment. This also gives Grandpa Joe a better reason to accompany Charlie to the factory since he knows more about it than the others. He's also seen helping with chores after the tour, further divorcing him from his 1973 version's "deadbeat" reputation.
  • Willy Wonka gets this as well: his infamously furious rant at Charlie, his seeming lack of safety standards in his factory, moments of manipulative trickery, and lack of concern for his charges when they act make a lot of people see him as a psychopathic slavedriver who revels in child murder.
• Rooting for the Empire: This article that makes the argument that Violet should have been the one to inherit the factory.
• Sacred Cow: It was already Vindicated by History by the time the 2005 film came out, but the huge backlash against the latter by general audiences and later the death of Gene Wilder in 2016 cemented this film as this. The Tom and Jerry crossover/remake Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, which came out in 2017, has even became the duo's most-hated direct-to-video production for how it treats the source material, among other things; even compared to Warner's previous attempt at shoehorning the duo into an animated remake of a classic fantasy musical (The Wizard of Oz, in that case).
• Signature Scene:
  • The creepy and psychedelic boat ride.
  • Willy Wonka saying “You lose! Good day sir!” to Charlie and Grandpa Joe.
  • The group's entry into the chocolate room, with Wonka singing "Pure Imagination."
• The Scrappy: Grandpa Joe gets a lot of hate and there are entire blogs dedicated to bashing him, mainly because fans see him as a Designated Hero. Particularly with his actions in this adaptation where he is a bad influence on Charlie, inspiring a (somewhat satirical) subreddit dedicated to hating him with over 135,000 subscriptions.
• Special Effect Failure: The producers noted that the film was given a shoestring budget even at the time of $2M, so they made a lot of shortcuts. In general for as good and beloved as the movie is, even diehard fans will admit that the special effects tend to look hokey at best.
  • Even when the film was released, kids could tell the "candy" the children try to eat during "Pure Imagination" are inflated balloons.
  • When Mike eats the exploding candy and it... explodes, you can see the smoke is coming from a stand right in front of him.
  • The boat scene is plainly just rear projection.
  • Granted, it's not like there were many techniques to show Violet turning blue onscreen, but it's quite clear that her transformation into a blueberry starts with them shining a purple spotlight on Denise Nickerson's face. Also, if you watch it in fullscreen, you can see the hose that's inflating the rubber suit she's wearing.
  • One of the few updates in the 2005 version that fans of this movie have approved of was making the chocolate river actually look like chocolate, rather than the... questionable-looking brown liquid here, which even one of the parents says looks more like sewage (some have less-favorably compared it to diarrhea) than anything remotely edible. Ironically, the chocolate river here was actually made of chocolate, while the river in the 2005 version was made of paint and liquified plastic.
  • When Wonka transports the chocolate bar the "television" he sends it to is clearly a hollowed-out white box with a black shelf inside it. Mike's line of "How can he take it? It's just a picture" doing nothing to hide the fact that it's clearly three-dimensional.
  • It's hardly as egregious as some other examples but during the Fizzy Lifting Drinks scene, there are moments when you can quite clearly see the wires holding up Peter Ostrum (especially when Charlie is initially just floating around thanks to the costume being unable to conceal where the wires connect to his trousers) and Jack Albertson.
  • The reason for the Adaptation Species Change from nut-sorting squirrels to golden chocolate egg-laying geese was to avoid this trope, as the filmmakers knew there was no hope of pulling off the squirrels with turn-of-the-Seventies tech.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: The Chocolate Room with Willy Wonka's "Pure Imagination" setting the tone.
• Squick: The chocolate river is this to many people, who find that it looks more like muddy water, or, as one character within the film comments, sewage, instead of delectable chocolate. The rest of the film's cast felt bad for Michael Bollner, who played Augustus Gloop, since he had to film numerous takes falling into the river and getting sucked up the pipe. Bollner himself admitted the experience was "disgusting". The irony is that they used real chocolate and cream in the water to try and make it look realistic, which obviously didn't photograph very well (plus the cream quickly spoiled and turned out a nauseating odor by the time filming ended).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: As catchy as the Oompa-Loompas' short songs are, it's a shame they didn't try to go for more accurate adaptations of the longer songs already present in the original book.
• Tough Act to Follow: One of the biggest reasons adaptations of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory after this tend to be contentious is because the lead is compared to Gene Wilder. Supposedly, Nicolas Cage was considered for a never-made adaptation in 1999, but lost interest. Not quite a bad thing, because many believe he'd have made the character even darker than Tim Burton's interpretation did.
• Toy Ship: Charlie often gets paired with Violet, as she's arguably the most sympathetic of the other children in this version.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • From the dated special effects to some of the slang used to the technology and pop culture depicted (with a fair amount of psychedelic surrealism thrown in) the film certainly evokes its 1971 origins. Lampshaded in the DVD Commentary, watching the psychedelic Scanimate effects during a segment of an Oompa-Loompa song:
  Denise Nickerson: "C'mon, that was pretty good for 1971!"
  Paris Themmen: *deadpan monotone* "I'm freakin' out."
  • Charlie also takes the extremely-unsafe chemistry class. "Now Charlie, you take the nitric acid (!) and glycerine"?
  • A reporter gives Augustus Gloop a brief specification that he's "the fame of Western Germany", dating the film to the Cold War.
  • The joke about Martin Bormann-in-Paraguay wouldn't resonate today. Not just because Bormann's remains were found in Berlin a few years later, but with World War II fading from collective memory, you need to be a historian to recognize him, let alone understand the joke.
  • The scene when Charlie finds the Golden Ticket and is encouraged by a crowd of strangers might seem oddly unrealistic to more jaded viewers — Charlie is mobbed as soon as he finds the last ticket in a highly-coveted worldwide contest, yet not a single person even thinks about stealing it from him.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: The naughty kids, with the exception of Veruca. Yes, they may be spoiled brats, but their misdeeds (expected from a child) and most of their failings are ridiculously minor (such as eating too much gum or watching too much TV,) and their punishments are so over the top, such as being turned into a human blueberry, it's hard not to feel bad for them, especially since the film seems to ignore how each kid's parent seems to be the one more responsible for their children attitudes, and yet the kids are framed as the bad ones and not their parents. Not helping is that Augustus is actually nice to Charlie, who tries to save him from drowning.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Grandpa Joe is supposed to be a Cool Old Guy who is very close to Charlie, yet many fans see him as a Lazy Bum who spends years in bed (instead of helping Charlie's poor parents) and then being suddenly able to walk when Charlie gets the Golden Ticket.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Charlie and his mother being upset by Grandpa Joe's vow to quit tobacco. Not helped that the Oompa-Loompas actually say gum chewing is GOOD for stopping you from smoking (they also say it's okay when it's once in a while, but it's still more than what the other kids got). Even worse, Grandpa Joe's reasoning to stop smoking tobacco was because it was too expensive a habit for such a small family; the fact that he's already in poor enough health that he's bedridden doesn't even come up.
  • Mike playing with a realistic toy gun would certainly not fly with mass shootings all too real in today's world. He brings it with him to the factory and even pretends to shoot Willy Wonka with it, yelling "WHAM! You're dead!". If that happened these days, he'd be tried as a juvenile delinquent. It does have the bonus that Wonka's response (turning to his mother and saying in a sincere, loving voice "What an adorable little boy you have") comes off like another glorious instance of his Consummate Liar status.
  • Slugworth getting way too close to Veruca and the other golden ticket winners and whispering in their ear can be a bit uncomfortable for modern viewers, especially since no parents or other adults nearby seem to be put-off by it. With more awareness of child predators, most people today wouldn’t be alright with a stranger invading a child’s personal space.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Despite some of the more dated special effects, the set design is still a treat for the eyes, especially the Chocolate Room and the Inventing Room, which Julie Dawn Cole described as being "the kind of place that only existed at Disneyland."^*Harper Goff, the production designer, worked on several Disney movies, including 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and was one of the artists involved in the design phase of Disneyland. It also led to one of the most memorable gags in which Wonka picks a flower, drinks out of it like a tea cup and then eats it (it was actually wax, which Gene Wilder spat out as soon as the director yelled "Cut!").
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Augustus Gloop's fate, the boat ride...
• The Woobie:
  • Charlie, of course. Poor, comes from a broken family, can barely afford the chocolate that gets him in the factory, well-meaning but (seemingly) admonished by Wonka for the Fizzy Lifting Drinks incident. He does win out in the end, though.
  • Violet after she's been turned into a blueberry, who the fandom attests is not even a jerkass woobie. She can barely move and, after having a Motor Mouth for much of the film, can't muster the words to speak. In addition, she's the only kid who's around for her Oompa-Loompa song, looking utterly humiliated. It doesn't help that she's been rolled around for a minute by the Oompa-Loompas like a beach ball, when Wonka just said she might explode. Given that she comes across as the most pleasant of the naughty kids (her sin is chewing too much gum), you hope she'll leave the factory in one piece.
  • Augustus in the 1971 version seems like a very nice, polite, quiet, mild-mannered boy and his comeuppance comes off as a bit much. Moreover, he didn't really disobey Wonka; Wonka had said that practically everything in the room was edible and did not specifically instruct them not to touch the chocolate river. Augustus then fell in moments after Wonka asked him to stop.
• Woolseyism: In the German dub, the ticket-finding computer's snarky reply "What would a computer do with a lifetime supply of chocolate?" becomes "Thank you, very kind of you, but I prefer sausage to chocolate." Likewise, the scientist's frustrated response is "First, I'm going to teach this sassy computer some manners!"

---