Tag Archives: Willy Wonka

Willy Wonka Mad Scientist VII

One last post on Willy Wonka before moving on to other topics.

In the 2005 adaptation, Mike Teavee presents an interesting sort of character in that it is suggested that even if a horrid child, he is something of a mad genius.  He finds the golden ticket that gets him into Wonka’s factory not through dumb luck (like Augustus Gloop and Violet Beauregard) or a brute force approach (like Veruca Salt) or the operations of karma (Charlie Bucket, of course) but through a calculation — something involving shipping dates, controlling for the weather, and “the derivative of the Nikkei.”

And confronted with Willy Wonka’s transportation technology, he takes a perfect mad scientist attitude.

int. willy wonka’s television room – day

mike

Don’t you realize what you’ve invented? It’s a teleporter! It’s the most important invention in the history of the world. And all you think about is chocolate.

mr. teavee

Calm down, Mike. I think Mr. Wonka knows what he’s talking about.

mike

No he doesn’t. He has no idea! He think’s he’s a genius but he’s an idiot. But I’m not…

Mike makes a dash across the room toward the teleporter device, knocking down two Oompa-Loompas as he does so.

wonka

Hey little boy…don’t push my button.

But push the button Mike does, with himself as experimental guinea pig.  An ideal “I’ll show them” attitude that wouldn’t be out of place in more movies than I could probably name.

Now Mike does sort of get out of his predicament, albeit rather changed.  Wonka’s remedy for Mike shinkage is to stretch him out like taffy.  This leaves Mike rather tall and thin, as the shot of the departing horrid children clearly shows.

Mike, unlike Violet, gives no indication of being at all pleased by his transformation.

I don’t think I’m giving away a spoiler in indicating that in the end Charlie ends up as Wonka’s heir as a mad science confectioner.  But what of Mike?  Might he not be vowing revenge?

I think that there could be a great sequel here, where a grown-up (but still physically warped) Mike Teavee becomes a supervillain mad scientist, seeking to wreck revenge on the grown-up Charlie Bucket.

Willie Wonka Mad Scientist VI

Mike Teavee’s fate at the other end of his teletransporter adventure is to be re-assembled — but not quite at the right scale.  In the 1971 adaptation this means a not-too-convincing front projection effect to show Mike to scale with his profoundly dismayed mother.

Special effects technology had improved a lot by the time of the 2005 adaptation, but Mike still ends up tiny.

The concept of someone shrunk to really tiny through either magic or mad science is at least as old as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (and probably much older). but the 1971 adaptation is the first cinematic version of the idea I can recall seeing, and probably the first that many other people can recall seeing as well.

And unsurprisingly, it’s fetish fuel for some.   For one thing, if you shrink only the person but not the clothes, it’s a way to get someone naked in a hurry.  (It’s the flip side, of course, of making someone expand dramatically without the clothes adapting.)  I’ll admit, I’ve gone there before, and I’ll go there again with a slight re-write, if only because I want to try out a bit of new blogging technology.   I’ve been trying to figure out a means for comic book scripting in HTML that shows possible underlying panel and page geometry better than a simple linear script.  Of course that’s not something that a person of ordinary prudence and common sense would attempt, but since I’m clearly not one of those, here goes:

STACEY, a voluptuous coed, is wearing a short skirt and a v-neck shirt with the words GNOSIS COLLEGE written on it She is stepping onto the transporter pad, a circular raised dais with large cables running into it.

CAPTION: A demonstration for the skeptic!

STACEY: Professor Oddbol, are you sure this is safe?

A full-on view of PROFESSOR ODDBOL, who is wearing a full-length labcoat and a pair of heavy goggles, and standing behind some sort of elaborate control panel.

ODDBOL: Perfectly safe, my dear. I propose only to send you across the room..

Stacey is being picked up by Oddbol’s hand (the scaling shows that Stacey has shrunk down to the size of Oddbol’s index finger.

CAPTION: Looks like Oddbol will being doing some interesting experiments soon.

STACEY (balloon with tiny words): Put me down!

There is a Stacey-shaped FLASH where Stacey was standing on the platform. Stacey’s now-hollow clothes are caught in mid-action beginning to fall to the pad.

CAPTION: Transported!

SFX: SZZZT!

STACEY (partially jagged balloon): Well, okay but…EEEK!

A tiny Stacey is standing, nude, covering her private pats with her hands. Behind her, the giant face of Oddbol can be seen looming. He is scratching his head.

STACEY (balloon with tiny words): Help me!

ODDBOL: Oh dear. There seems be a problem with the matter scaler.

It’s worth noting, I suppose, that Tim Burton, whom the Gods blessed with abundant weird and who did both the 2005 Willy Wonka adaptation as well as a recent version of Alice in Wonderland does toy with the idea that shrinking and growing will get the pretty girl out of her clothes.  But of course, since it’s a PG-rated movie made within the Empire of Mouse, he only toys with the idea.

Out on the wide Internet, we might be poor in resources but we are rich in creative freedom, and people go much deeper into the kink of shrinking.  One of the finest might be the Minimizer, who really has a thing for shrinking women, and unsurprisingly often for the mad science that might lead to their creation.  Ve comes up with the most becoming of sketches.

Should you wish to extract some extra kink from the image, the (probably) mad scientist who wields the pencil which helpfully provides a sense of scale here is a woman.

The Minimizer does commissions.  And the links page shows that there are some people who are clearly way into all this.  I wonder how much of it might have started with Mike Teavee… [Faustus May 11, 2018: This information is probably no longer current as the Minimizer’s site appears to be no longer maintained. The one link in the post above is to a preserved version in the Internet Archive.]

Willy Wonka Mad Scientist V

The last horrid child to fall into a near-death trap is Mike Teavee, who’s a little too much into television.

The setup is this.  Wonka has created a mad science technology that allows him to break down a physical object into tiny components and transmitted to a remote location — in effect, something like Star Trek‘s transporter device, save that it’s not really meant for people.  Wonka wants it simply to transmit chocolate bars to people’s TV sets — a form of advertising, you see.

In the 1971 adaptation, Mike is a little overly fascinated by the prospect of being on television.

And this has a rather dangerous outcome.

In the end, Mike does end up reassembled.  Sort of.  The outcome of the process will be the subject of tomorrow’s post.

I’m pretty sure that I saw this scene as a child well before I ever saw an episode of Star Trek or any other use of a matter transporter in fiction.  Was I impressed?  Well, look around what I write:  what is the Apsinthion Protocol is a process of being broken down and re-assembled, here imagined as a sort of very elaborate sex machine.  More obliquely, the strange process Iris goes through is a kind of disassembly and reassembly.  The unnamed native girl in the ethnographic film footage watched by Maureen is disassembled, not to be reassembled exactly, but perhaps to be apotheosized.    And of course, my own response to the “how do you want to die?” question posed to me by W. in the Thaumatophile Manifesto involves my own participation in a self-inflicted transporter accident.

The 2005 adaptation of the same scene involves the use of a visual meme that should be familiar to readers of this blog.

But perhaps more interesting is the change in Mike’s motivation in this scene, which deserves, and will get, its own post.

Willy Wonka Mad Scientist IIA

A footnote to l’affaire Gloop, if you will.  Like many kids, I didn’t just watch the 1971 movie adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  I went to the source text by Roald Dahl, where I found glosses on the the whole Augustus Gloop incident like this:

“Mr. Wonka doesn’t seem to think so!” cried Mrs. Gloop. ” just look at him.  he’s laughing his head off!  How dare you laugh like that why my boy’s just gone up the pipe!  You monster!”  she shrieked, pointing her umbrella at Mr. Wonka as though she were going to run him through.  “You think it’s a joke, do you?  You think that sucking my boy up into you Fudge Room like that is just one great big colossal joke?”

“He’ll be perfectly safe,” said Mr. Wonka, giggling slightly.

He’ll be chocolate fudge!” shrieked Mrs. Gloop.

“Never!” cried Mr. Wonka.

“Of course he will!” shried Mrs. Gloop.

“Because the taste would be terrible,” said Mr. Wonka.  “Just imagine it!  Augustus-flavored chocolate coated Gloop!  No one would buy it.”

That’s on pp. 75-6 of the 2007 Puffin edition, if you care.

All these years — decades, really — later I reflect and wonder if this naughty cannibalistic image didn’t create in my head scenes like this from Gnosis Dreamscapes.

 

int. an industrial set inside “hygeine and you” – day

Professor Wagstaff stands with LITTLE BOBBY, a boy of perhaps eleven, watching cans coming down a conveyer belt through a hole in the wall.

little bobby

Gee, Professor, this isn’t quite what I expected.

Little Bobby picks a can off the assembly line and looks at it.

close-up: a can

The lable has a picture of a smiling, well-scrubbed and properly coiffed Marcia on it, with the legends CANNED MARCIA and AS SEEN ON T.V. on it.

back to scene

PROFESSOR WAGSTAFF

Well, little Bobby, let that be a lesson to you. Always check the settings on the machine before you start.

LITTLE BOBBY

I will, Professor. I promise.

What a tangled thing our psyches are.

Willy Wonka Mad Scientist II

If there are any among you who don’t know the core plot behind Roald Dahl‘s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or its various film adaptations, it is this.  Eccentric industrial chocolatier (and, as I would argue, first rate mad scientist) Willy Wonka sets up a world-wide lottery that picks five children (with one guardian each) to go on an exclusive tour of his rather strange and dangerous factory.  Four of the lucky winners are beastly children whose misbehavior leads them to get into near-fatal trouble.  The fifth is the penurious but angelic Charlie Bucket, whom Willy Wonka adopts as his heir at the end.

The first beastly child to get in trouble is Augustus Gloop, a gluttonous boy unable to resist the temptations of Willy Wonka’s chocolate river.  Unsurprisingly he falls in and is promptly sucked up into one of the river’s effluent pipes wherein, due to excessive girth, he gets stuck for a while.  In the 1971 film version, he looks like this:

What’s beneath him is high-pressure liquid chocolate (he’s lucky to have been sucked up head-first!) which will eventually push him up through the tube to a destination elsewhere in Wonka’s factory.

One obvious fetish that will be fueled by this scene is something called wet and messy fetishism, arousal brought about by being coated in messy fluids or semi-fluids, chocolate being a popular choice.  It’s not something I know much about, but if you wish to suggest interesting resources in the comments, then by all means dive right in.

Fetish fuel for a new generation came in the 2005 version:

The prop designers deserve extra credit on this one, because the tube empties into a transport vessel that looks a lot like a flying saucer, thus giving the scene an additional alien abduction overtone.  Some people are into that.

Of course there’s another bit of fetish fuel linked to girls in tubes, something for which these scenes provide a visual reference.  Now I’ve certainly covered girls in tubes here at Erotic Mad Science quite a bit, so surely I’m not going to do it any more, am I?

Oh, please, just one more image?  This one has robots in it as a bonus.

Found at Janitor of Lunacy, where else.

Willy Wonka Mad Scientist I

If you were to ask someone to name a mad scientist you’d be unlikely to get the answer “Willy Wonka.”  What an injustice!  Because in many ways Wonka is just much a mad scientist as Dr. Frankenstein or Rotwang.  He isolates himself from society, surrounds himself with grotesque assistants, and experiments away endlessly with bizarre substances which can have truly radical effects on those who consume them, wittingly or not.  Also, like a mad scientist, his morality is rather at variance with accepted social norms:  surely no normal person would allow children to play around  in close proximity to a variety of near-death traps into which they fall, repeatedly, right in front of their horrified parents.

And also, try looking at the cinematic versions of Willy Wonka’s invention workshops and just try telling me that you’re not looking at an imaginatively arranged mad lab.  Here is the 1971 version:

And the 2005 version…

If that’s not mad science in action, I’ll eat a case of Slugworth‘s.

But does any of this belong at Erotic Mad Science?  I mean, these are children’s movies, right?

Only half right.  These works might have been largely intended for children, but they clearly left impressions in the minds of young viewers which weren’t erotic experiences at the time they were seen, but which lingered and would eventually become fetish fuel — things not erotic in themselves (at least, not intended that way and probably not seen that way by most viewers), but which would eventually form the visual or conceptual anchors of fantasy.   Fetish fuel is a concept I’ve implicitly worked with before, in the context how an old monster movie might have affected people’s sexual imaginations.  I shall be posting on a few examples of it in the Willy Wonka/thaumatophile context over the coming week.