‘Charlie And The Chocolate Factory’ Lost Chapter Is Darker Than Baking Chocolate
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had an unpublished chapter that was just as dark as that trippy boat ride through a tunnel of terror.
The Guardian recently published Ronald Dahl’s cut Charlie and the Chocolate Factory chapter about a Vanilla Fudge Room. It might sound delicious, but two young chocolate factory visitors likely met their ends there.
The room contained a five-story-tall magical mountain of fudge that Charlie and the other children enjoyed climbing (and eating). Of course two disobedient boys, Wilbur Rice and Tommy Troutbeck, decided that playing on a mountain of sugar wasn’t exciting enough, so they hitched a ride on two wagons full of fudge. Willy Wonka issued his usual half-hearted warning, but the boys didn’t listen. Unfortunately for them, the wagons took them straight to “The Pounding And Cutting Room.”
“In there, the rough fudge gets tipped out of the waggons into the mouth of a huge machine. The machine then pounds it against the floor until it is all nice and smooth and thin. After that, a whole lot of knives come down and go chop chop chop, cutting it up into neat little squares, ready for the shops.”
According to BBC News, the 1961 draft of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory didn’t just feature this unpublished chapter. Originally there were ten children visiting the factory rather than six, and Charlie went to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory with his mother, not his grandfather. However, the difference that might seem strangest to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fans is this: The Oompa-Loompas were called Whipple-Scrumpets.
It would have been harder to work “Whipple-Scrumpets” into the songs that Willy Wonka’s Snooki-colored employees loved to sing, but the strange green-haired beings still made up tunes in Ronald Dahl’s early drafts.
“Eight little children – such charming little chicks. But two of them said ‘Nuts to you,’ and then there were six.”
The other two children who disappeared in the draft that featured the unpublished chapter were named Augustus Pottle and Miranda Grope, and it seems as though at least one of them got sucked into one of the many tubes in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.
Lucy Mangan, the author of Inside Charlie’s Chocolate Factory, told BBC News that Ronald Dahl wrote five drafts of the story that would eventually birth one of the internet’s favorite memes. And obviously he finally got it right — Charlie and the Chocolate Factory will mark its 50th anniversary in October, and children today still enjoy visiting Willy Wonka’s world of pure imagination.
However, things haven’t always been sugar and spice and everything nice for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. As The New Yorker reports, some Ronald Dahl fans weren’t happy about the new Toddlers & Tiaras-esque cover that Modern Imprints recently chose for the beloved book, dubbing it “sexualized” and “creepy.” It features a doll-like girl with a blank stare and more makeup than Kim Kardashian.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory also appears on a Cracked list of “The 6 Most Secretly Racist Classic Children’s Books” because Dahl originally imagined the Oompa-Loompas as black pygmies from Central Africa. Luckily for the author, most readers thought that it was okay for made-up beings with orange skin to be treated like slaves.
The Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movies have also faced scrutiny. Ronald Dahl was not a fan of the 1971 movie titled Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. He complained that it focused too much on Wonka (Gene Wilder) and not enough on Charlie. Dahl wasn’t around to see the remake starring Johnny Depp, but Wilder was happy to rip it apart for him. As The Inquisitr previously reported, the actor dubbed the Tim Burton remake “an insult.”
What do you think of the unpublished Charlie and the Chocolate Factory chapter about children getting chopped up with chocolate? Should Ronald Dahl have kept it in the final story?
