Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator



A sequel to Charlie and The Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, beginning directly where the previous story left off. The previous book has ended with Charlie, having just inherited ownership of Wonka's factory, crashing through the roof of his home to pick up his family in a huge glass elevator (it can go in any direction, not just up and down). Having spent the past 20 years in bed, Charlie's grandparents (except for Grandpa Joe, who was already out) refused to get out of bed, so Wonka, Charlie, and Joe just pushed the bed into the Elevator.

This book opens with Wonka flying the Elevator really high, with the intention that they will then shoot straight down through the roof of the chocolate factory. However, Grandma Josephine accidentally causes them to fly into space, where they end up in orbit around the Earth.

You'll probably be unsurprised to hear that this book was a lot less popular than the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It was never made into a film adaptation, since Dahl hated Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory enough to refuse all rights to make this book into a film. In addition, the Burton remake has complete closure, negating the circumstances of this book. Dahl was working on a third book, Charlie in the White House, but when he died, only one chapter was complete, hence the lack of real closure at the end.

This story provides examples of:

 * Adults Are Useless: Or in this case the U.S. government.
 * Artificial Gravity: In the Space Hotel.
 * Chew Toy: Georgina.
 * Defictionalization: Robert Bigelow of Budget Suites of America is now working on a space hotel (and actually has two small prototypes already in orbit, so it's not just a pipe dream). No word on whether he's worried about "Mr Hilton" sabotaging it, though.
 * Gravity Sucks: Inverted. When the Elevator gets "too high", it spontaneously starts orbiting the Earth.
 * Horde of Alien Locusts: The Vermicious Knids.
 * Informed Ability: A humorous example: The three American astronauts transporting the staff to the Space Hotel are introduced as being "handsome, clever and brave", and proceed to do absolutely nothing, much less anything clever or brave, for the rest of the book. It's still possible they are handsome.
 * Knock Knock Joke: The President inflicts a few of these on people.
 * Made of Indestructium: The Elevator is "shockproof, waterproof, bombproof, bulletproof, and Knidproof". Sure enough, the Elevator is undamaged when a huge Knid rams it at high speed.
 * Minus World: Minusland is an dreary example of this.
 * Mistaken for Aliens
 * Mistaken for Spies
 * Narrative Profanity Filter: "The President said a very rude word into the microphone..."
 * Orphean Rescue: For Grandma Georgina.
 * Our Presidents Are Different: Lancelot R. Gilligrass may be the arch-typical President Buffoon.
 * Padding: Among other things, we get the President's nanny singing a song about raising him.
 * Toilet Humor: In response to the grandparents taking too much Wonka-Vite, the Oompa-Loompas perform a song telling the sad tale of a little girl who foolishly helped herself to the tastiest-looking stuff in her grandma's medicine cabinet -- which turned out to be chocolate-flavored laxatives...
 * Whos On First: Mr Wing and Mr Wong on the phone, and explaining the carpets are wall-to-wall to Mr Walter Wall.
 * A Worldwide Punomenon: The book is filled with puns, such as the Chief Financial Advisor trying to balance the budget. (It kept falling off his head.)
 * As well as the aforementioned Mr. Wing and Mr. Wong leading to the president saying that "every time you wing you get the wong number."