Wonka

Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory, was on tonight and that reminds me of my dream to find a place that is made out of entirely candy :)

anyways .... here are few facts about the movie



The combination to the first door in the chocolate factory is 99-44/100% pure, which was an ad slogan for Ivory Soap.

Among Wonka's lines are the following quotations: "Is it my soul that calls me by my name?" from William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet"; "All I ask is a tall ship and a star to sail her by" from the John Masefield poem "Sea Fever"; "A thing of beauty is a joy forever" from John Keats's "Endymion: A Poetic Romance" and "Round the world and home again, that's the sailor's way!" from William Allingham's "Homeward Bound".

Peter Ostrum, who plays Charlie Bucket, made no other films. He later became a veterinarian. In fact, of all the Wonka kids, Julie Dawn Cole is the only one still acting.

Julie Dawn Cole (Veruca Salt) hated chocolate.

In the scene where Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder) drinks from a flower-shaped cup and then eats the cup, the cup itself was made of wax. Gene Wilder had to chew the wax pieces until the end of the take, at which point he spat them out.

The reactions of the actors in some scenes are spontaneous. For example, when the children first enter the main factory and see the gardens, their reactions are real, it was really their first view of that particular set.

A number of the objects and plants in the main factory really were edible, including the giant lollipops.

The film was originally financed by the Quaker Oats Company. They hoped to tie it to a new candy bar they intended to bring on the market. When the film was released, the company began marketing its "Wonka" chocolate bars. Unfortunately, an error in the chocolate formula caused the bars to melt too easily, even while on the shelf, and so they were taken off the market. Quaker sold the brand to St. Louis based Sunline, Inc. (which later became part of Nestlé via Rowntree) not long after this; Sunline was able to make the brand a success, and Wonka-branded candy (most of which isn't chocolate-based) is still available in the USA.

The opening credits sequence was filmed at a real chocolate factory in Switzerland.

Most of the small walk-on parts in this movie were played by German people.

The final Oompaloompa song took a total of 50 takes.

After reading the script, Gene Wilder said he would make the film under one condition: that he would be allowed to do a somersault in the scene when he first meets the children. When asked why, Gene Wilder replied that having Willy Wonka start out limping and end up somersaulting would set the tone for that character. He wanted to portray him as someone whose actions were completely unpredictable. His request to do the somersault was granted.

Many of the words that come out of Willy Wonka's mouth were literary quotations. This was not in the original script that Roald Dahl wrote. All of the numerous literary references were added for one reason or another by David Seltzer when he re-wrote the screenplay.

The exterior of the chocolate factory was Munich's gas works.

This movie was shot in Munich, Germany, but the producers had to go outside of Germany to recruit enough little people to play the Oompa Loompas (one of the many tragic legacies of the Nazi era). Many of the people cast as Oompaloompas (German or otherwise) did not speak English fluently, if at all. This is why some appear to not know the words to songs during the musical numbers.

Willy Wonka's line, "The suspense is terrible, I hope it will last" is a quote from Oscar Wilde's play, "The Importance of Being Earnest".