Why Grandpa Joe is really the villain of ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’
For decades, Mel Stuart’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory has been a staple of afternoon and weekend television schedules. It only makes it more fascinating and easy to forget that it was a flop disowned by its creator.
It may have been adapted from Roald Dahl’s book, with the author being the credited writer of the screenplay. However, he distanced himself from the uncredited rewrites made by David Seltzer, which left him less than happy with the increase in sentimentality and the shift in focus away from Charlie Bucket and onto Willy Wonka.
It wasn’t until years after its release that it experienced an uptick in popularity, either, with Paramount opting not to renew the rights in 1977 and allowing them to be picked up by Warner Bros. In the hands of new ownership, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory was recirculated on the small screen to become an enduring cult favourite, with the studio laughing all the way to the bank after Tim Burton’s remake and Paul King’s musical prequel Wonka combined to earn almost a billion dollars at the box office.
The discourse surrounding the film has taken a sinister turn, too, giving rise to the popular theory that Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka may in fact be a serial killer with a penchant for luring unwitting victims to their demise on the premise of being given an all-access tour of his chocolate factory. There’s plenty of evidence to support it, but even if the movie is rewatched under the impression that Wilder’s eccentric, aloof, and malevolent confectionary magnate harbours a desire to maim and dismember, that still doesn’t make him the villain of the piece. Instead, that distinction unequivocally falls on Grandpa Joe.
The most obvious is that he pretended to be bedridden for 20 years despite being perfectly capable of launching into elaborate song-and-dance numbers at a moment’s notice. Joe quite happily let Charlie’s poor mother tend to his every need for decades, only discarding the charade when it suited him. Not once did he consider giving up his expensive smoking habit, either, despite the family being forced to survive on scraps.
Before they even get to the factory, Joe sings about how he has a golden ticket even though he’s really only Charlie’s plus one. Once they get there, he displays a flagrant disregard for the rules by encouraging his impressionable young grandson to ignore Wonka’s words of warning and imbibe the Fizzy Lifting Drinks before the recipe has been perfected.
Not content with breaching the terms of the agreement by illicitly consuming the Fizzy Lifting Drinks, Joe then rants at Wonka for failing to hand over a lifetime supply of chocolate. Clearly, he’s forgotten that it was at his urging Charlie actively sabotaged his own shot at infinite sweet treats before suddenly deciding it’s a massive insult. It’s a situation that would have been avoided entirely if it wasn’t for him. Who encouraged Charlie to sign the contract in the first place without bothering to read the small print? That’s right, it was that damned Grandpa Joe.
Throughout the entire tour, in fact, Joe paints himself as a bully who goes out of his way to derive maximum enjoyment for himself at the expense of not only the other guests but also Charlie. He’s a terrible human being and a rampantly self-serving one at that, to the extent that nobody would have batted much of an eyelid were he to be added to Wonka’s ever-expanding list of victims.
