Willy Wonka and the Seven Deadly Sins

[jmowreader]

Most of us have seen either Gene Wilder's magical LSD-laced children's classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory or the Johnny Depp-helmed abomination Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

If you look closely at this movie, it's actually a Christian allegory. A vast amount of our art is. Wonka, who appears to be a CIA officer when he's not making candy, is faced with five children, all of whom he tests:

Augustus Gloop, whose sins are Sloth and Gluttony. He is punished by being sucked into the factory's chocolate transport pipeline and dumped into a fudge boiler.

Violet Beauregard, whose sins are Pride and Lust. Her penance is to be tempted with a stick of "three-course dinner" gum that turns her into a blueberry.

Veruca Salt, whose sins are Greed and Envy. She's dumped down a garbage chute.

Mike Teavee, whose sin is Wrath. He gets processed through the Wonkavision system and comes out the size of a juvenile rat.

and Charlie Bucket, the most pure child of them all - one so good that Wonka rigs the contest to ensure his presence on the tour by declaring the Russian guy's ticket to be a forgery, placing a bar with a new ticket in it in the sweet shop Charlie goes to on the rare occasions he has money, leaving money in the snow for Charlie to conveniently find so he'll go in and buy candy, and making sure the sweet shop owner sells that exact bar to Charlie. (You gotta admit, that the Wonka employee who runs around impersonating Slugworth knows exactly where and when in the entire world he needs to be when a child opens a bar with a ticket in it is...well, kinda suspicious.) Wonka tests Charlie (with the fizzy lifting drinks and gobstopper in the good movie, and by demanding Charlie leave his family if he wants the plant) and finds no flaw in his essential goodness.

Now for tonight's exercise: Let's change from five kids to eight - one for each of the seven deadly sins, plus Charlie. Which leads us to this breakdown:

Charlie: no sin
Augustus: sin of gluttony
Violet: sin of pride
Veruca: sin of greed
Mike: sin of wrath

Describe one of the remaining three children, who have the sins of sloth, lust and envy. What are their names? How do they express their evilness, and how does Wonka boot them off the tour?

[forgotmylogin]

1. Envy: Evan Neville

He wants to be Willy Wonka, dresses in similar fashion, and hate-idolizes him. He's sociably friendly to everyone on the surface but vindictive and devious on the inside. He's got a fake Wonka Twitter account, Instagram account, and other social media accounts, dressing up like Wonka, pretending to be him, posing and convincing other young people that he is him, sucking up the fame. When the Golden Ticket tour happens, he sees a shortcut to his goal of becoming a chocolatier and eclipsing the Wonka brand by instead taking over WW's own factory, or at least learning enough on the tour that he can reveal all of Wonka's secrets to his rabid fanbase.

In the Chocolate Printing Press Room, Wonka produces millions of chocolate renditions of any image on candy paper like edible trading cards. Each of the kids gets a turn at creating their own image in chocolate. Neville isn't satisfied with one ("I've got three-point-eight million followers!" ), and after a sassy papparazi-style photo shoot by the Oompas, throws a lever and sets the machine to make so many copies that the machine malfunctions and he gets flattened in a stack and lost among a zillion identical chocolate copies of himself (cue song) after which the Oompas and his mother must begin the tedious process of peeling apart every sugary page in the mile-high stacks to sort through carefully one at a time to potentially locate and rescue him.

[pansypoo53219]

2. i liked both versions. mainly because of christopher lee.