In 2004, two anonymous authors going by the names Oompa and Loompa,
launched the satirical website,
Say No To Grandpa JOE.
The website states it's tongue-in-cheek purpose as such,
"Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a well-loved movie based on the wonderful book,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Parents love it. Children love it.
Heck, we even love it.
That does not mean it is perfect.
Our goal is to expose the dark underbelly of the story,
to reveal once and for all the truth about the only real villain in the movie.
No, It's not Slugworth.
It's grandpa Joe."
Look at me.
The website goes into detail on all of the reasons they hate Grandpa Joe.
He's ill-mannered, slovenly, misogynistic, perverted,
hard-hearted, vindictive, selfish,
cruel, a slacker, and he's a bad influence on Charlie.
For several years, the meme remained a niche Internet curiosity like,
can you believe that some people hate the character you're obviously supposed to like?
But the idea is skyrockets in popularity after
a viral rant by sports commentator Jim Rome on the character in 2010.
This guy lays in bed all day long in his pajamas,
while his old lady's working like,
she's triple shifting at the laundromat.
Then the second the kid comes home with the gold ticket, he's right out of bed.
He's going to dance around.
He's going to sing a song about how he has a golden ticket.
He doesn't, Charlie has the golden ticket.
That's grandpa Joe for you.
Grandpa Joe is a monster.
Is he the bad guy or something?
You could walk this whole time.
You walrus mustache son of a.
Characters that make my blood boil and fill.
Grandpa Joe. Fuck that guy.
In file most of the memes are just as much of a joke as the original website.
I think it's also true that they are often shared sincerely,
and that they satisfy a white hot anger towards the so called lazy poor.
Why did this happen?
Truly it is incredible,
the way that Wonka mania has descended upon the globe.
While the world such as we watch and wait,
wondering where the pursuit will lead.
It has to be noted that the vast majority of the memes around
Grandpa Joe are solely about the version of the character that appears in the 1971 film,
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory starring Gene Wilder and
not the character as he appears in the original 1964 novel.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
or the Tim Burton directed remake of that name that came out in 2005.
It's worth thinking about why this version of the character draws the most ayer,
while the other two do not.
I think a lot of this has to do with tone.
The original novel is written in
a very sentimental and sincere tone and reads almost like a fairy tale.
There is a lot of emphasis on the whimsy and wonder of the factory.
The chief selling point of the Tim Burton remake seems to be
that it would do what the original film did not.
By being as faithful to the source material as possible,
with at least one huge exception we'll get to later.
Tim Burton's film has a nearly identical plot to the novel and even includes
tangential chapters like the anecdote of
Willy Wonka selling a chocolate palace to an Indian Maharaja.
It includes all of the competing chocolate companies in the early parts of the story.
It makes sure to tell you the name of the chocolate bar.
Charlie finds the golden ticket in which is the same as it is in the book.
One Wonka whipple-scrumptious fudgemallow delight please.
But it was for some reason different in the Gene Wilder version.
Why not try a regular Wonka bar this time?
But there's a lot of care put into getting everything exactly right.
The aesthetics of the world are detailed,
perfect recreations of what is in the novel.
For example, in the book,
we get this passage about the boat Wonka has on the chocolate river.
It was a large open rowboat with a tall front and a tall back like a viking boat of old.
It was of such a shining, sparkling,
glistening pink color that the whole thing looked
as though it were made of bright pink glass.
That's exactly what appears in Burton's film.
Whereas the filmmakers of the first movie read that passage as,
Willy Wonka has a fancy boat.
The boat in that movie, it looks like this.
All of this is part of Burton's attempt to evoke the whimsy the book does.
The music choices put a layer of sentimentality over everything.
The narration is warm and comforting like
the stories being read to you by your parents before bedtime.
He was not faster or stronger or more clever than other children.
In a lot of respects, Burton's film is the book just onscreen.
That is true for Grandpa Joe.
As in the book, Grandpa Joe is very sweet in all of his scenes.
He gives Charlie money so he can buy more chocolate and get a golden ticket.
He celebrates when Charlie gets the golden ticket
before he learns that he gets to go to the factory as well.
He doesn't sing a song about how he has a golden ticket rather than Charlie.
Because I've got a golden ticket.
He doesn't encourage Charlie to try the fizzy lifting
drink that nearly gets him kicked out of the competition.
The Burton movie also doesn't exclude Mr. Bucket in the households,
which makes it feel like Grandpa Joe was being less of a burden on Mrs. Bucket.
Both the book character and the remake character are written so that
the audience is rooting for Charlie to help Grandpa Joe.
Though, obviously, the fact that the Burton film is not as popular
as the original is also why people tend to focus on this Grandpa Joe.
Comb your hair, wash your face, polish your shoes.
Rather than this one.
Please tread back and we'll open it together.
The Gene Wilder movie is very different
from either of the other entries in the franchise.
There are major plot differences between the characters.
There's no Mr. Bucket, Grandpa Joe only jumps out of bed
when he learns that he himself is going to go to the factory.
A lot of the intrigue about where Willy Wonka gets
his workers and what his competitors are up to is emitted.
The movie changed so much of the original book that Roald Dahl actually hated it,
thinking, among other things,
that it put too much emphasis on Wonka and not enough on Charlie.
With Grandpa Joe specifically,
the changes can make it seem that he is putting a bigger burden on
the family than he is in the other versions of the story.
That he's just being lazy rather than genuinely frail.
But again, the biggest difference between this film and
the other Chocolate Factory stories is tone.
It actually shocked me how much of an absurdist comedy this movie is,
especially in its first half,
which had been erased from my memory for a decade,
overshadowed by its opulent second half in the factory.
But in that first half of the story,
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is not a film that takes place in reality.
Everything is heightened and insane,
and everyone is insanely obsessed with Willy Wonka's chocolate.
Teachers are teaching percentages by using Wonka's chocolate as an example,
the president of the United States has
Wonka chocolates brought to him because even he wants a golden ticket.
The movie has these hilarious cutaways to random characters that feel more
at home in an Austin Powers movie or an SNL sketch.
In this one, a woman's husband has been
kidnapped and the kidnappers want her to give them
her Willy Wonka chocolate bars and she's like, husband or chocolate.
Ms. Caz, did you hear me?
It's your husband's life or your case of Wonka bars.
How long will they give me to think it over?
There is so much buildup about how special getting
to go to the factory is that when Charlie finally gets the ticket,
that movie celebrates this with 1,
2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,
9 extremely long shots of Charlie running through London while the music swells.
It's glorious.
In his only display of cinematic self-restraint,
Tim Burton only used two shots for this moment.
It's in the context of this absurd setting where everyone
unquestioningly will do anything for chocolate or chocolate is
the most important thing in the world that
Grandpa Joe suddenly regaining the ability to walk
just because he gets to go to
the chocolate factory is the least silly thing that happens.
But the memes about Grandpa Joe aren't really about Grandpa Joe,
though they sometimes make fun of his other qualities.
The main reason the character is memed is because he is seen as
the perfect example of a poor person who is poor because they are lazy,
a leech on society,
and a burden on their loved ones.
Though the pervasiveness of the meme doesn't mean
people actually think about the character this way.
Like it's still usually a joke.
It does strike at a deeper perception about how the world works and who is to blame.
But why is it the Grandpa Joe's of the world provoked so much rage?
Why not freaking Willy Wonka himself?
If you want to view paradise,
simply look around you and view in.
Grandpa Joe isn't the only character from this movie who is the subject of a meme.
You've probably seen this image more times than you can count.
On know your memes.com,
it's called condescending Wonka,
and it's used to sarcastically tear down someone's foolish opinion on something.
It's not hard to figure out why this character is idolized.
All of the build-up to Wonka's factory is built up to meeting Wonka himself.
Everyone up until that point looks up to him.
He dresses fantastically and he's our guide to this fantastical world,
presented as all-knowing, all seeing,
on top of this Gene Wilder's performance is
magnetic and often hints at a deeper layer to the character behind his eccentricities.
But Willy Wonka, not a good person, is.
If we're going to tear down Grandpa Joe for the economic consequences of his actions,
then why not Willy Wonka as well?
First and foremost being,
he uses slave labor.
Let's, talk about the Oompa-Loompas and their history.
In the original edition of the novel,
the Oompa-Loompas were described as African pygmies.
But after the film was announced,
the NAACP argued that Wonka going to Africa,
picking up workers and bringing them back to England to work in his factory,
pretty much resembled slavery one-to-one.
Dahl actually agreed with the criticism,
and in a new edition they took out the pygmy background,
and in the art, they were drawn as white people similar to hippies.
Also, in fairness to Dahl,
he originally wrote Charlie as black,
but the publisher had him change this thinking that audiences would reject
a black protagonist because nothing's changed.
Then in the Gene Wilder movie,
the Oompa-Loompas were made even more fantastical;
with their orange skin, green hair,
and white eyebrows, further distancing them from any racial connection.
The Burton films revised all of this in
the opposite direction by having all of the Oompa-Loompas played by Deep Roy,
a Kenyan-British actor with Indian parents.
That film also depicts Wonka trekking through the forests of Loompa land
and shows the Oompa-Loompas society before Wonka takes them to his factory.
The franchise has both tried to steer away from
these colonial implications and then tried to embrace them.
But in either case, it's hard not to look at Wonka for what he is;
a colonialist capitalist who brings the people of one country to
another so that they will do labor for him without him having to pay them actual money.
He pays them with cocoa beans.
Now, the reason the Oompa-Loompas are in the story at all is interesting though,
because they are the answer to the initial mystery in the story.
In all three versions before the plot starts,
Wonka gets worried that spies from
other companies are stealing his chocolate-making secrets,
so he fires all of his workers and replaces
them with Oompa-Loompas who all live in the factory,
allowing him to shut the factory away from the rest of society,
which heightens the entry for Charlie and the reader as
no one can tell them what's in there before they get there.
How does Willy Wonka run his factory without workers?
He has Oompa-Loompas.
Imported direct from Loompa land.
It's also a plot point that really brings together a full picture of what kind of person
Willy Wonka is and why our reaction to him as a character is so strange and interesting.
Because we are on some level meant to react with a level of awe and wonder at Wonka.
That's what everyone in the story is doing and everyone who gets frustrated
with him throughout the film is immediately comically punished,
leaving Wonka always looking like the victor.
But again, Wonka fired all of his workers just to maintain intellectual property,
and then he replaced them with slaves.
All of the wealth the factory produces is wealth that he extracts from
society without putting anything back in the form of jobs.
You want to skewer Grandpa Joe because he allegedly
doesn't provide for his family while feigning sickness.
Well, why is Charlie's family impoverished in the first place?
It's because Grandpa Joe used to work at
the chocolate factory and then was one of the people Wonka fired.
You're living in poverty, Charlie,
just so this rich can profit off the chocolate you love rather than a different rich.
Let's pump the breaks a little bit here.
These are just movies and these are just memes.
But what I find interesting about all of them is that it
points to a way of viewing the world that is pretty common.
Memes are in some sense true.
They become popular because they strike a chord with us,
not just as a piece of humor,
but as a representation of our values.
You do not need to search very hard for examples of people blaming the poor for
their poverty and calling them lazy while turning around
and portraying billionaires as eccentric and brilliant.
I suppose this is actually one of the things I like about the Burton remake,
even though the 1971 film is in my opinion, much more fun to watch.
The portrayal of Wonka as
this intensely socially awkward germaphobic shut-in with deep-seated daddy issues that
everyone pretty much uniformly hates is a hilarious inversion
of what we've come to expect of the mythical industrialist genius.
Meanwhile, in the Wilder film,
they're glorifying Wonka right up until the credits.
It always feels very strange and a little bit uncomfortable that
the way Charlie wins is just that he gets to have the factory,
but only on the condition that he runs it the way Wonka wants it to be run.
It doesn't feel like a victory.
It feels like child abuse but the movie still uncritically looks up to Wonka.
I think it's really easy to fall into the trap of
thinking about the world in these easy tropes.
When I watch Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,
I wish we could resist the urge to condemn people as
Grandpa Joes and be a little more skeptical of people trying to be Willy Wonka.
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