Charlie and the Chocolate Factory/WMG

Note: for guesses specific to the 1971 film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, click here.

Wonka intended for each child to win.
Each child, throughout the different adaptations, displayed skills that would definitely be useful for a Wonka as a successor. Veruca would theoretically know how to handle resources, given her upbringing, Mike would know how to handle the media, Violet and Augustus would be the perfect people to test the products on (once they had been proven non-lethal), since they were both big fans of candy and gum, and Charlie would be the perfect figurehead of the company. Really, who couldn't support a company that took in an impoverished local child to run a magical candy factory?

Unfortunately for Wonka, he seriously underestimated most of the childrens' selfish thoughtlessness, and all but Charlie injure themselves, making for terrible PR. In the end, Wonka is forced to take Charlie as his sole successor, in the hope that he can train him to run the company without the help he intended for him to have.

The stories take place in an alternate universe in which The Future came early or "on schedule," or in our future.
After some terrible economic crisis, much of the world is set back decades, while some other groups (the Teevee and Salt family included) become the new technological elite. Of course, Wonka's technology was never available to anyone else, he's just that good.

Evidence: there seems to be a president in office that we've never heard of, a group of pygmies we have never encountered, and a whole functioning space hotel.

Wonka is the Devil
Willy Wonka is portrayed in the book looking vaguely demonic. In both the movie and book versions, he tempts the children with their sin. For example, Mike Teevee is sloth, Veruca is greed, Augustus is clearly gluttony. Many of the children have multiple deadly sins associated with them. When tragedy strikes the children, Wonka half-assedly gets help, as though he is not very interested in saving them. Alternately, Wonka is a Old Testament style God, and Grandpa Joe is the Satanic figure. (Seriously, what possible good could come from tempting Charlie into mucking about with the Fizzy Lifting Drinks?)
 * Support: Wonka is clearly Lawful Evil (assuming you believe in Lawful Evil).
 * Burton!Mike may be Pride, but that title could also belong to Burton!Violet. Hmm...
 * No, no, Burton!Violet is definitely Pride. Burton!Mike is probably Wrath, since he is a naysayer throughout the tour.
 * Funny note, originally Dahl planned to have seven children...
 * In the book, Charlie stayed in place and didn't play in order to conserve what little food energy he got for growing and not starving. Environmentally enforced Sloth, anyone?
 * If it's forced upon somebody then it's not a sin. Charlie is just being sensible.
 * Therefore, he wins.

Between all three mediums, all seven deadly sins are present
Let's look at the list, shall we?
 * Augustus: Gluttony (all three mediums)
 * Veruca: Greed (all three mediums)
 * Violet: Pride (all three mediums)
 * Mike: Sloth (book/1971 film)/Wrath (2005 film)
 * Charlie: Envy (according to a WMG and the 1971 film)


 * OR
 * Augustus: Gluttony
 * Veruca: Greed
 * Violet: Pride
 * Mike: Sloth
 * Wonka: Envy
 * Carlie: Wrath (Averted, Wonka didn't expect him to succeed)

But what of Lust? It's there in a blink-and-you-miss-it moment in the 2005 film. The portrayer? Violet's mother. The scene? About 6:30 of this clip

This is Dante's Inferno

 * Wonka is Virgil
 * Charlie is Dante
 * Look at the above arguements
 * Each chamber is a different circle
 * The boat ride is crossing Styx
 * This isn't five pages.

Wonka is Haruhi Suzumiya
Yes, this is on every page like the Time Lord posts, but again, it's not that unreasonable. The existence of such a bizarre factory with its impossible candy, Oompa Loompas, and various eccentricities like the chocolate room seem like the kinds of things a Cloudcuckoolander Reality Warper would do.

Wonka is George Weasley
According to a cut chapter, Wonka makes a certain line of sweets designed to help children fake being sick to get off school. He favours a fantastical more explodey type of invention over efficiency. He is slightly sadistic to those who really deserve it and will go out of his way to tempt people into their own punishment.
 * This actually would explain a lot, especially all the crazy inner workings of the place, the types of candies with werid effects (there are fairly common charms that could be placed on them and they bear some resemblence to Fred and George's products at least in style), and why there is a huge mystery surrounding the factory (Magical secrecy rules, temporarily lifted in this one case). A Wizard really did it. Bonus points for it being set in Britain as well.

Wonka is Xenophillius Lovegood.
You-Know-Who came and destroyed his factory.

The Candy Man is Haruhi
The world tastes good because the Candy Man thinks it should.
 * You win.

Willy Wonka's factory doesn't make chocolate.
Instead, it makes LSD flavored to taste like chocolate. All of the things the kids saw on the tour of the chocolate factory? An LSD induced hallucination. The kids who were kicked off of the tour had a bad trip.

All the chocolate Wonka's factory makes is laced with LSD.
And so he brings the whole world to its knees before him.

Mr. Wonka is secretly The Mad Hatter.
He is often seen wearing a top hat, and the sequel book shows that much of the factory is underground. ""These rooms we are going to see are enormous! They're larger than football fields! No building in the world would be big enough to house them! But down here, underneath the ground, I've got all the space I want. There's no limit â€” so long as I hollow it out.""
 * Both films, while not showing it, imply it. The long hallway to the chocolate room heads down.
 * Wonka directly states in the first book that most of the factory, including all the most important rooms, is underground. He even gives the reason:


 * Certainly, this is true. Willy Wonka = The Mad Hatter = Johnny Depp. Where does Jack Sparrow fit into the equation?
 * Captain Jack Sparrow.
 * That was his previous incarnation, of course.
 * Which Mad Hatter? Lewis Carroll's or Jervis Tetch? It would add a new wrinkle to the Golden Tickets, that's for sure.

Mr. Wonka is a spark.
This might go some way toward explaining Britain's apparent world power status In-Universe. With all the stuff he makes in the books (including space capable lifts), the odd licorice-powered laser and hard boiled warship might just be on the agenda, too...
 * He's got to make Wonka-style TV common first.

Mr. Wonka is a Devisor
This would explain why he can create candy that is impossible as defined by the laws of physics, because as long as he thinks it works, it does. He is obviously a VERY high power devisor at that, in fact, as his candy always works right and doesn't explode everyone who touches it (unless that's what it's supposed to do, of course.)

Mr. Wonka is a Genius
He has a special, higher than ordinarily possible, version of Beholden and Production Line that allows him to create huge amounts of wonders in Pill Form, allowing the strange effects. Pill Form prevents Havoc unless directly interfered with; eating it destroys it before it can be properly messed with. He is a rogue Staunen.

Loompaland is a Bardo of all of the deepest darkest Africa stuff that got disproved once we had explored it properly.

The tests were intended to find another Genius, not someone of upstanding character, by allowing them to fiddle with the Wonders before they were placed in Pill Form and seeing who didn't incur Havoc; this raises the distinct possibility that Wonka is Illuminated or at least very close. Charlie is an unaffiliated Hoffnung with psi-based Wonders. Mike Teevee is a Lemurian Neid.

Mr. Wonka is Haruhi Suzumiya's father.
It is possible that Wonka fell in love with a Japanese woman and had his last name changed to hers, and then had her somehow inherit his reality warping powers.

Willy Wonka is Charlie Bucket
It could be that Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka was next in line to Peter Ostrum's Charlie. The Willy Wonkas in both movies both gave their factories to the Charlie Buckets at the end of their respective movies. So it's possible that even before the book was written, a Willy Wonka has always given the Wonka factory to some nice bloke called Charlie Bucket when it's about time to retire.
 * Sounds plausible. But Peter Ostrum's Charlie either had bad luck distributing his Golden Tickets or else chose to test for something other than moral character in the hopes that he could train that with the chocolatiering. (Wilder's Wonka tested for moral character; Depp's Wonka has a very shaky grasp on it.)
 * And they all keep handing down the name? Makes sense; no one would surrender to the Dread Candyman Charlie.

Wonka designed the tour to try to tempt each child with a Karmic Fate, so as to better evaluate them.
Because how many rooms do they enter where there is not an ideal temptation for one of the little brats?

Now the question becomes, what of Charlie? Did his not come up? No. His happened, but he was smart enough or pure enough not to take it. Everlasting gobstoppers, designed for children exactly like Charlie, are one of the few things we get shown directly but that the children do not get karma'd by. The temptation for a boy like Charlie, who gets one freaking thing a year, to take one of those? Huge. And if he had tried it? Dunno. Maybe lockjaw?
 * This makes the Invention Room a double threat, since Everlasting Gobstoppers and chewing-gum meals both come from there.
 * In the 1971 film, Charlie does get karma'd by Fizzy Lifting Drinks. But his deciding to leave without the Everlasting Gobstopper is a last-minute save.
 * Although if he'd left with it and never given it to Mr. Wilkinson, he might still have won.
 * "Never" is a long time. Wonka had already told Charlie that he would get "NOTHING!" And if Charlie had kept the Gobstopper and left, Grandpa Joe might've given it to Mr. Wilkinson unilaterally -- Grandpa Joe was furious at Wonka right then...
 * This theory is strongly implied in the Burton-Depp film. We never learn the temptation there, unless we go with Charlie and decide that Wonka's initial offer when he's "won" is a temptation.
 * In the stage musical version, Wonka actually admits to this.
 * In this version, Charlie's temptation is apparently the Fizzy Lifting Drinks, as Everlasting Gobstoppers are only mentioned in passing. He and Grandpa Joe taste them in a scene similar to the 1971 movie, and Wonka praises them both for apologizing and being smart enough not to get caught in the first place.

Grandpa Joe is evil.
Of course! What nice person would pretend to be paralyzed in order to live off their poverty-stricken kid?
 * And it was Grandpa Joe, not Charlie, who suggested stealing Fizzy Lifting Drinks.

Wonka is of some relation or other to the Witch from Hansel and Gretel.
Both are twisted individuals who live in a candy-themed building and invite young children inside, promising them treats, and giving them something more horrifying. Coincidence?
 * This, if true, means that Charlie might come off worse than the others in the long run, since he's still at the factory. Wonka had less than a day to mess with the others, and so he had to get drastic. He can take as long as he likes with Charlie.

In making his factory, Wonka inadvertently tunneled into Gensokyo
Since phenomena in Gensokyo are caused by the active disbelief of people beyond the barrier, this explains how most of the factory can shamelessly run on Nonsensoleum yet still work. The geography might be a stretch, but Gensokyo is known to have a deep underground network of... well, hells; and Yukari is more than lazy enough to not bother with someone tunneling through a weak point of the Barrier into nothing but solid rock.

Grandma Georgina is acting like her mind is out there but is in fact very bright.
This holds for both film versions.

There were a few points near the beginning of the Tim Burton film where This Troper thought that Georgina knew exactly what everyone was talking about. She just acted like she didn't to mask her true intelligence.

Wonka is some form of supernatural being with Reality Warping powers
Probably a relatively low-level trickster deity or one of The Fair Folk. In the 2005 film, he doesn't look quite...human. He's not just pale, he's kind of grey and translucent. Being magical in nature, he can make such things as everlasting gobstoppers and ice-cream that doesn't melt happen even if they're impossible, along with sheep that have candyfloss for wool and square sweets that look round and so on. The squirrels are under his control, as an elemental being. The television chocolate thing works because, although he has no idea how physics really works, he expects it to work the way he thinks it does and therefore it does. The Oompa Loompas are some kind of subordinate beings, or beings that he created or summoned up from elsewhere. This is similar to the "Wonka is the Devil" WMG at the top of the page but different; in this interpretation he's not malevolent or trying to punish anyone, just mischievous and out to cause minor chaos and have fun. Normally he would channel those sorts of impulses by making crazy candy and occasionally by messing with the Oompa Loompas (say, by turning them into blueberries or making them float or sprout hair all over their bodies), but he became bored and decided to bring some humans into his factory to "play" with. Think of him like Trelane; just out to enjoy himself, but does it by messing around with less powerful beings than himself and isn't overly concerned about hurting them.

(There are problems like him having a father in the 2005 film, but I'm pretty sure I could explain away any inconsistencies if you gave me about 10 minutes. Like maybe he came into the mortal world as a Changeling.)

End essay.

Wonka invented the never-melting ice cream because of the Indian-esque prince's palace.
Chocolate melts when it gets warm, as reinforced by the melting palace. Therefore, it is imperfect because it cannot be used for such long-term applications as a cake topper (applications where it would never be eaten, such as a palace that wouldn't have its parts continually replaced, would likely be blasphemy in the eyes of Wonka). While Wonka was unable to find a way to keep chocolate from melting in heat without compromising its taste, texture, or other attributes, he did stumble upon a method of solidifying sugared milk solids that would become liquid when exposed to certain enzymes such as those in saliva. The obvious use of this? Ice cream that never melts no matter how hot the summer day is, yet is still perfectly edible. If Wonka doesn't care that warm, solid ice cream would feel horrible due to the change in temperature alone, he likely wouldn't care about the compromises, and saw it as a similar acceptable lower quality for a "novelty" product such as civilian Astronaut Ice Cream. Although...

Wonka invented freeze-dried ice cream.
Once a head at NASA noticed, they connected the dots between it and the freeze-dried food they used to feed astronauts before toothpaste-tube food came into vogue. This would be the perfect way to keep ice cream from melting while they transported it to their newly-designed space hotel without the cost and weight of freezing!