Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: Difference between revisions
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[[File:ChittyChittyBangBang.jpg|frame|Our fine four-fendered friend!]]
''{{quote|''You're sleek as a thoroughbred.
Having noted the success of [[Disney]]'s ''[[Mary Poppins]]'', its [[The Sixties|1964]] [[The Edwardian Era|Edwardian Era]] [[Musical]], [[Metro Goldwyn Mayer]] sought three years later to re-establish its position as the leading purveyor of musical films by hiring [[The Sherman Brothers]], the same song-writing team that had scored ''Poppins'', to adapt another period piece into a big-budget musical extravaganza. The result was ''' ''[[Chitty Chitty Bang Bang]]'' '''.▼
''Your seats are a feather bed.
''You'll turn everybody's head today.
''We'll glide on our motor trip
''With pride in our ownership
''The envy of all we survey!''}}
▲Having noted the success of [[Disney]]'s ''[[Mary Poppins]]'', its [[The Sixties|1964]] [[The Edwardian Era|Edwardian Era]] [[Musical]], [[Metro Goldwyn Mayer]] sought three years later to re-establish its position as the leading purveyor of musical films by hiring [[The Sherman Brothers]], the same song-writing team that had scored ''Poppins'', to adapt another period piece into a big-budget musical extravaganza. The result was '''
Caractacus Potts (an English inventor [[Not Even Bothering with the Accent|with an American accent]] played by Dick Van Dyke) rebuilds an old wreck of a race-car and makes a few slight improvements, such as giving it the ability to [[Cool Boat|sail]] and to [[Flying Car|fly]]. With his kids, grandfather and the beautiful daughter of a candy mogul, Caractacus travels to the distant, vaguely ''mitteleuropäisch'' land of [[Ruritania|Vulgaria]] (location shooting for the film version was done around the [[The Sixteen Lands of Deutschland|Bavarian]] castle of Neuschwanstein and in the medieval town of Rothenburg-ob-der-Tauber), where they get in trouble with the country's [[Aristocrats Are Evil|Evil Aristocrat]] leaders who [[Child-Hater|hate children]], but like their car (hey, it's better than [[The Alleged Car|a Lada]]). Naturally, they steal both.
The book it's based on was written by [[Ian Fleming]]. Yes, [[James Bond (novel)|
{{tropelist}}
* [[Absurdly Spacious Sewer]]: Under the castle.
* [[Accidental Aiming Skills]]: The Baron tries to shoot his own wife when she gets launched into the air and held up with a [[Parachute Petticoat]] under the pretense he's [[Make It Look Like an Accident|trying to help her down]]. But he does succeed in popping her dress and having her land safely, much to his disappointment.
* [[Ad Break Double Take]]:
* [[All Just a Dream]]: All the parts with Vulgaria and the car flying (except the very end) are a story Potts tells to his children while on a date with Truly.
** Except in the stage musical, where we are expected to believe all this really happened.
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*** [[Or Was It a Dream?]]
* [[Amphibious Automobile]]
* [[Anachronism Stew]]: The Baron's army includes knights in greathelms, Napoleonic cavalry, and late 19th-century riflemen.
** Also, the costuming is definitely [[The Edwardian Era|Edwardian]], but the steamship, the zeppelin and the cars could conceivably be from the ''1930s''.
* [[And I Must Scream]]: Trudy's "Doll on a Music Box" song seems to suggest a story of a human who has been enspelled and turned into a doll, although possibly it's an analogy of how she feels trapped in a [[Gilded Cage]] as a [[Lonely Rich Kid]].
* [[Aristocrats Are Evil]]: Baron and Baroness Bomburst, the leaders of Vulgaria.
** Though averted hard with Truly Scrumptious, who is, [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|well...]]
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* [[Attack! Attack! Retreat! Retreat!]]: The lone Vulgarian foot soldier following behind the cavalry, when the gates close behind him.
* [[Auto Kitchen]]: Caractacus Potts has a [[Rube Goldberg Device]] breakfast-making machine as one of his many household inventions.
* [[Awful Wedded Life]]:
* [[Bang Bang BANG]]: The tiny cannons Bomburst's forces use all make booming noises quite out of proportion to their size.
* [[The Baroness]]: ''The'' Baroness. Unlike most examples, this Baroness is in fact an actual baroness. She is married to a baron and lives in the capital of a barony.
* [[Black Humor]]: Toward the end of the film, several characters are thrown into the lake near Neuschwanstein Castle. If you know the history of Neuschwanstein (there were several tragic drownings in that lake), this is a ''lot'' darker.
* [[Blush Sticker]]: Truly and Caractacus wear small red circular stickers on their cheeks as part of their doll disguises during the Baron's birthday party.
* [[Brick Joke]]: On the way back to Vulgaria, the two spies are thrown off the zeppelin when Baron Bomburst tries to lighten it. Later, we see the spies having swum all the way back, but because the Vulgarian people are fighting at the castle, they head back into the water to swim away.
* [[Building Is Welding]]:
* [[Bungling Inventor]]: Caractacus.
* [[Car Song]]: The theme tune.
* [[Child-Hater]]: Having been invented by [[Roald Dahl]], Vulgaria naturally has its whole culture built (very illogically) around this
* [[Childless Dystopia]]: Vulgaria.
* [[Chroma Key]]: Used to make Chitty fly. You can see blue matte lines in some shots, especially around Jeremy and Jemima's hair and inside the see-through trim on Truly's hat.
* [[Cliff Hanger]]:
* [[Cold Equation]]: [[Played for Laughs]] when the crew of the Baron's airship have to jettison excess weight in order to carry Grandpa's hut back to Vulgaria. (This occurs during Grandpa's song "Posh!".) After exhausting everything not critical to the airship's function, they toss the two spies overboard. (Non-fatally -- the spies manage to swim back to Vulgaria just in time to see the Baron overthrown.)
* [[Cool
* [[Cool Boat]]: Chitty can float as well as fly. (Although technically, sea-going Chitty is a ''hovercraft''.)
* [[Cool Car]]: Guess...
* [[Counterpoint Duet]]:
* [[Country of Hats]]: Subverted. This initially seems to be the case with Vulgaria and child-hating, but it turns out to be a hat recently forced upon the collective unwilling heads of the Vulgarians by the neurotic baroness.
* [[Crapola Tech]]:
* [[Creation Sequence]]: A montage of scenes showing Caractacus's actions -- often idiosyncratic and sometimes apparently silly -- during Chitty's reconstruction.
* [[Creator Backlash]]: For many years, Heather Ripley, who played Jemima, never talked about the movie because her parents divorced during its making and she blamed the film for it. However, her attitude towards this movie has become fonder now.
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*** Chitty is an [[wikipedia:Autogyro|autogyro]], not a helicopter.
* [[Food Fight]]: Makes up a fair amount of the first stage of the rebellion against the Baron.
* [[For the Evulz]]: Baroness Bomburst and her husband hold a strong vendetta against children for reasons that only Dahl knows what.
* [[Gainax Ending]]: The ending has the Caractacus and Truly fly off in the car. Despite it already being revealed the car only had the ability to do that in the dream sequence.
* [[Genre Adultery]]: Based on a children's book written by a man famous for gritty spy novels.
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* [[Homemade Inventions]]: Caractacus's various devices. Some of the fun of them is noticing where he repurposed existing things -- like silverware -- to make parts for them.
* [[Hubcap Hovercraft]]: Chitty's amphibious mode, which appears to be a genuine hovercraft.
* [[I Don't Like the Sound of That Place]]: Vulgaria; and it's a [[Meaningful Name]]
* [[Inferred Holocaust]]: Unusually, in the [[Backstory]] of the movie: It's never explicitly specified what the law against children was going to do about any children already in existence, but the very fact that their parents hid them away suggests that a "Massacre of the Innocents" was in the offing. Worse, that was by no measure an entire barony's usual population of tweens and teens living under the castle, even given how small Vulgaria seems to be -- they are likely to be the ''survivors'' of an initial purge of children from the barony.
** And afterward: The youngest children hidden under the castle are perhaps 10 or 12, which tallies with the Toymaker's line that the Bombursts' law against children was passed a decade or so earlier. Even assuming that the villagers took turns caring for them, how many infants died during the first months or years of their exile? What happened that no children younger than 10 or 12 are in evidence? It's unlikely that an entire barony has chosen celibacy for over a decade -- so what happened to any babies born in that time? Or worse, any women who got pregnant?
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* [[Meaningful Name]]: Caractacus Potts. Dick Van Dyke himself once said it was just a long form for "crackpot".
** [[Lampshaded]] in the case of Truly Scrumptious with the song that bears her name. ("By coincidence, Truly Scrumptious, you're truly, truly scrumptious.")
** [[In-Universe]], "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" is a descriptive name born of the sounds the car makes. (On the meta-level, it came from "Chitty Bang Bang", the name of several real race cars of the era, which was obscene (for the time) [[World War I]] slang about what soldiers do when they get their leave chits.)
* [[Mr. Starship]]: Chitty. But this instance of the trope is not so much the fault of the audience as it is the fault of the main characters who endow Chitty as a character themselves. One may notice that the characters only take it so far; for example, they never refer to Chitty as 'he,' only as 'it.'
* [[Names to Run Away From Really Fast]]: C'mon now? ''Bomburst''? (Not to mention "Vulgaria"?)
** Kids, NEVER TAKE SWEETS FROM A STRANGER, PARTICULARLY IF THAT STRANGER IS CALLED THE CHILDCATCHER.
* [[Never Say "Die"]]: It's never explicitly specified what the law against children intended to be done about the children already in the country, but given that their parents
* [[Nice Job Breaking It, Herod]]: The Bombursts' law banning children only results in the children being hidden and learning survival skills that aid them in overthrowing the Bombursts years later.
* [[No OSHA Compliance]]: The Scrumptious candy factory doesn't have handrails and has some of the boiling vats of sugar sitting on the edges...
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* [[Parachute Petticoat]]: Happens to the Baroness when she is launched from Chitty's [[Ejector Seat]].
* [[Parenting the Husband]]: Baron and Baroness Bomburst. She buys the man ''toys'', for God's sake, and coos over him as if he were a precocious, temperamental infant. (Which, admittedly, he totally acts like.)
* [[Percussive Maintenance]]: When the giant music box that is given to the Baron as a gift for his birthday doesn't start up correctly, a swift kick from Caractacus gets it started again. Possibly a choreographed part of the whole performance, though, and thus a subversion.
* [[Perfectly Cromulent Word]]: "Phantasmagorical". Which is, in fact, a real if somewhat obscure word that hasn't been in common usage since the 19th century.
* [[Playing Gertrude]]: Lionel Jeffries, who plays Grandpa Potts, was actually six months younger than Dick Van Dyke.
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* [[Sesquipedalian Smith]]: Caractacus Potts.
* [[Shipper on Deck]]: Jeremy and Jemima work very hard to get their dad Caractacus together with Truly.
* [[Sickeningly Sweethearts]]: Played with. The lyrics and tempo of "Chu-Chi Face" make it sound like the Baron and Baroness are this trope. But throughout the song, the Baron [[Lyrical Dissonance|makes repeated attempts to kill her]] while she (mostly) seems to remain oblivious.
* [[Sinister Schnoz]]: The Child-Catcher.
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[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Films of the 1960s]]
[[Category:Films Based on Novels]]
[[Category:Film]]
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