Like Dr. Ian Malcolm says it in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, the studio and estates behind a fall competition show were likely preoccupied with whether or not they could, and didn’t stop to think if they should. The show is Wonka’s The Golden Ticket. Billed as a competition show, it looks much closer to the vetted and over-acted competition shows on the food networks. It’s supposed to tug on your nostalgia for the Gene Wilder movie and the original Raold Dahl novel. But it definitely doesn’t match what passed for an edible workshop back in 1971. The worst part is when you dig in and find the voiceover is an artificial intelligence-created version of Gene Wilder.
How desperate does his estate and heirs have to be to hand over his likeness to something like this? Is Netflix that desperate? Wilder called this type of thing out when asked about other Wonka remakes, stating, “It’s just some people sitting around thinking: ‘How can we make some more money?'” If he thought that about a Tim Burton movie starring Johnny Depp, it’s not hard to think he wouldn’t have approved of a game show using his voice as an afterlife endorsement. And Dahl was vocal about not liking the first adaptation of his book, so we can guess his response to something like this.
It’s the latest dumb idea grounded in A.I. Here’s the trailer:
It will be impossible to match Dahl’s vision or the crazy stunts in the fictional world of the 1971 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory starring Gene Wilder, which is being re-created for the show. The contestants there were subject to life-threatening harm. It’s absurd because that’s part of the story. To try to create it in real life in the 2020s is… lame. In the trailer for the show you see young people, who are too young to have been alive to watch the 1971 adaptation 55 years ago of Roald Dahl’s 1964 book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, feign amazement upon seeing the set of the show. The trailer has the authenticity of an episode of Let’s Make a Deal. Where was the worldwide ticket promotion announcing the contest, the one to find the Golden Ticket in chocolate bars? And please tell us Netflix isn’t hiring little people to play Oompa Loompas. That’s just cringey.
Gene Wilder was an American icon. Roald Dahl was a British icon. Here’s a suggestion: Check out Roald Dahl’s original book–but grab a used copy here at Amazon, at eBay, or at your local library. Or enjoy the original movie on a streaming platform or here.
The new show streams on Netflix in September.
C.J. Bunce / Editor / borg
