Anyone else feel the same as me - seen the clips, dont want to see the film?
When Charlie picked up the (dollar?) note from the sidewalk, it doesn’t look like any type of money in existence. If you look careful, you can see strange ‘runic’ stuff running around the edges.
Nitpick:It was a ten. Admittedly, issued on the Bank of No-Place-That-Exists-On-Earthistan.
My memory of Dahl’s illustrations has him looking like Jim Carrey’s version of Count Olaf in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Roald Dahl wanted Spike Milligan to play Wonka. That would have been interesting – he certainly had the ability to do the sort of surreal comedic delivery that Wonka demands.
I was searching around for Dahl’s description of Wonka, since my mental image of him comes from the illustrations from the first two editions, and I’ve noticed that some editions from the last decade or so depict Wonka as looking more like Johnny Depp’s portrayal, and I’m wondering what the text actually says about his appearance.
Anyway, no luck, but I did find something kind of interesting quite by accident:
A .pdf file that describes some of the early drafts of the book.
I was most surprised to see that Mike Teevee was at one point named “Herpes Trout.”
[quote]
The seven children in this draft are given distinct characteristics, which Roald Dahl listed on the first page, as follows:[ul][li]Charlie Bucket – a nice boy[]Augustus Gloop – a greedy boy[]Marvin Prune – a conceited boy [we never find out what happens to him, as his exit isn’t included in this draft, and he was then dropped][]Herpes Trout – a television-crazy boy[]Miranda Mary Piker – a girl who is allowed to DO anything she wants[]Veruca Salt – a girl who is allowed to HAVE anything she wants[]Violet Beauregarde – a girl who chews gum all day long.[/ul][/li][/quote]
Violet was also earlier named “Violet Strabismus,” which seems like a good name for her, especially if she spent too much time blowing bubbles. 
Dahl didn’t illustrate the book. The original American version was illustrated by Joseph Schindelman, and are very realistic-looking. The current edition has illustrations by Quentin Blake which are more cartoony.
Quentin Blake’s been doing the illustrations for ages, he was doing them when I was in primary school over 20 years ago. So I expect Dahl commissioned him himself.
Yeah, but there was so much else that was pretty obviously British. The mention of dollars in payment just stuck out like a turd in a punchbowl.
Dunno, that’s been my problem with each of the Harry Potter movies. The kid playing Harry is good at acting impressed by flying cars and magic spells going on about him. But you always get the feeling that the bad guy losing had a lot more to do with “random nifty stuff” happening than because it was Harry was causing the nifty stuff. Yet the books (at least the first) didn’t give such an impression. I suspect that the director is just stuck with whatever he can get out of his stars, particularly when it comes to kids.
Amazon.com allows to to search inside a number of their books, so I went into Charlie (that doesn’t sound right) to see what Dahl said Mr. Willy Wonka looked like.
Speaking of the book (not that we really were, but I want to tell you guys this and it doesn’t rate its own thread): I saw the movie tie-in version in a store the other day, and idly flipped through it to see what movie pictures they had used. The pictures were all together in a section right in the middle of the book. So right there in the middle of the book is a picture of Wonka and Charlie, captioned something like, “I want you to come and run the chocolate factory!” Way to spoil the book! I’m joking of course. Who will ever read it anyway, now that there’s a movie version?
Jackson…or a bug when he had on his Michael Jackson dinner-plate shades. Interesting you’d be looking for an either/or in a movie that all but screams: If you can believe it, it is so. I think they did that on purpose so that they could get your subconscious to play along and equate Wonka with someone familiar who’s efforts are highly successful in “The Real World” but who’s cognitive existence in “The Real World” is about nil.
Is it so hard to believe that Depp has massive amounts of talent AND Michael Jackson is creepy? Come on, test yourself!
Well, I believe the goal of the photos is to tell the story from beginning to end, as usually is with movie tie-in editions of novels.
Thanks for digging that up, mobo85. It looks like both Wilder’s and Depp’s portayals are equally faithful to the text, although neither of them resemble the original illustrations, outside of dress.
Okay, seriously, this whole Michael Jackson thing is bugging the hell out of me. I don’t think that the portrayal draws from Michael Jackson at all. Can anyone name a single thing that is objectively cribbed from the Jackson persona, that isn’t indicated in the book?
Yes, there were big ol’ goggles. “Michael Jackson dinner-plate shades,” though? What did they more closely resemble? Michael Jackson’s signature shades, or those described and depicted in the book?
Willy Wonka is very pale? Well, yeah-- it has been a decade since he’s been outdoors.
He’s eccentric? Umm…
He’s childlike? He’s a giggle-prone, candy-obsessed character, and has been since before the Jackson Five started recording.
He wears outlandish clothing?
What? What is it? What speech patterns do they have in common? What mannerisms? Wouldn’t a Michael Jackson-like Wonka do a little more than tap his feet during the Oompa Loompa songs?
This reminds me of nothing so much as the folks who claimed that the execrable Jar Jar Binks was a Steppin Fetchit/minstrel show/jamaican lampoon riff, but could never say exactly why, and completely ignored his roots as an ill-conceived Harold Lloyd homage.
He does look a bit like Jackson, in the sense he has a similar face shape, is quite thin, and slightly sinister.
I find some of the earliest drafts more distrubing than the final story.
If not for the premise, this could be a tale from the “Psycho Killer X Series” and could merit a slot on the X-Files. Does this reminds anyone of the “maze” game where the architect leads all the children in the tour to an ultimate, ghastly end?
In the second draft, it is mentioned that
Eweek!
It is quite a pleasant surprise that this turns up in the movie. Was this mentioned in the original story?
Right. Depp himself has said that he any similarity between him and Michael Jackson was unintentional.
Will Keenan’s role as Billy Tripley in the SVU episode “Sick”–now that was a rip on Michael Jackson!
In the book, too, he finds a dollar in the snow, even though the author was British.
I"m looking forward to it but can wait for the DVD. As far as I can tell Depp is great as Wonka. I love the “Let’s boogie” line that I’ve been hearing in the ads, for some strange reason.
The original book’s illustrations of Wonka were suggestive of diminutive Victorian-era millionaire, and that would hardly make sense for a movie set in the current day.
The version of the book published for the British market had him finding a fifty-pence piece. (I borrowed a copy from the library recently and just double-checked that.)
Maybe it was closer to the book, but I thought it was a poorly-executed movie.
Johnny Depp was a flop as Wonka, in my opinion. Yes, Gene Wilder has big shoes to fill. But this new Willy Wonka had none of the assertiveness, the personality, that the old one did. He just felt like a weird guy that happened to be there on the set - he did not, as Gene Wilder did, take control of the film, making it Wonka’s factory, providing a real interesting and entertaining character for the children (in the movie and in the audience) to be amazed by the way I was amazed when I saw the original for the first time (and many times afterwards.)
The sets were slick but vapid. Why, in that scene where Augustus Gloop gets sucked town the tube, in the new movie, was there no sense of atmosphere or tension, even though the set probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars more to create? The whole thing just felt phoned-in.
Danny Elfman’s music - UGH! So overproduced. So stupid. The new songs sounded like they had been composed by a middle school music class using the demo tracks on a Casio keyboard. Yes, I know they used the “real” lyrics. I think the old, “fake” ones were better.
The oompa-loompas, though, were the absolute, hands-down worst part of the movie. The whole thing screamed “look what we can do with our computer graphics!” Not to mention that having every single O/L’s face be the same guy actually detracted, in my opinion, from the idea that there was an organized crew of creatures working at the factory - instead, they just looked like the same guy seen through a kaleidescope, and since your mind registers the one face duplicated again and again, you do not get the impression of their being many different oompa-loompas. I saw only a slick CGI gimmick.
Leading up to the factory, the sense of Charlie’s poverty did not seem nearly as tangible as it did in the old movie. What I remember vividly, more than Charlie’s house, was the scene of his mother washing the laundry and Charlie walking through the dark, decrepit streets. It really did feel like they were living in a slum. On the other hand, there is no sense of this dark and decaying environment in then new movie because, again, it’s too slick-looking.
I didn’t like this movie at all.
At the end of the first movie, when Gene Wilder hugs the kid, I tear up. Gene is so kind and fatherly and you just know the bad times are really over at last. The kid is going to a wonderful place with a wonderful person, and the family’s been rescued.
At the end of the second movie, the kid’s going to live with this unstable guy that’s been stalking him. I want to call Child Protective Services.