Simply Second Nature - The Internal Mythology of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory: The Musical

A project I've been kicking around for a while now is an index detailing the various references made throughout the West End musical of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory to the film adaptations that came before it. As the number of variations on Roald Dahl's most iconic tale has grown over the years, it's interesting to chart the influence they've had on one another, the ways in which they've developed their own enduring canons and traditions separate from the book, and how each adaptation has striven to distinguish itself from the others. I know a lot of people are reacting to the upcoming film Wonka starring Timothée Chalamet from the angle of, "Another one? Jeez, how many more takes on this character do we need?", but Charlie and The Chocolate Factory is one of those IPs that I seriously anticipate providing the basis for many new takes and retellings for decades to come. We should fully expect to get a new Wonka at least once a generation (the only thing that amazes me is the dearth of notable attempts, to date, to adapt the book's sequel, Charlie and The Great Glass Elevator ^[1]). The original novel is nearly 60 years old, and it still strikes one heck of a chord with the youth of today. There are some aspects of it have obviously aged rather questionably (*cough* Oompa Loompas *cough*), but at its heart it is an evergreen story with an indelible cast of characters and a unique concept that's just the right mix of whimsy and ghoulishness. There's a reason why its popularity has endured over the years. I'm not saying that I'm not a little apprehensive about that Chalamet film myself, but it doesn't surprise me that we're back at the Wonka well yet again.

Of the current roster of Charlie iterations, I would say that, on balance, the West End musical is the one for which I feel the greatest personal affection - although, as I've previously indicated, there is no uniformly exemplary telling for me (just almost nearly perfect tellings), and my ideal Charlie and The Chocolate Factory experience would have to be comprised of an impossible pick n' mix of elements from the various incarnations across the decades (the West End musical gets enough pieces in the right place in terms of atmosphere and character, and yet there is at least ONE thing about it that will be stuck in my craw for all eternity). And it is specifically the musical in its original London form I'm looking to bat for. Directed by Sam Mendes, with a book by David Greig and with music and lyrics by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, it made its debut in June 2013 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where it ran until January 2017. After that, it was given an extensive retooling and a new (albeit short-lived) lease of life as a Broadway production...which, from what I've seen of it, might actually be my least favourite adaptation to date. I wasn't crazy about a number of the changes they made - in particular, I strongly dislike the move to have the bad children be played by adult actors. The defence that it creates more of a contrast with Charlie's innocence doesn't hold water, since a good cast of child actors would achieve that anyway by the sheer force of their personalities, and really, it's so much funnier and livelier when you get to see their outrageous antics coming out of actual children. I could accept it as a necessary evil during the recent UK and Ireland tour created by Leeds Playhouse (given the complications of having to travel all up and down the place whilst rotating out five different cast members with every performance) but I hope that for future productions we can go back to casting kids in the roles again. Kids who are clearly having a blast channelling their inner rapscallion. It's what I love to see.

In addition to Dahl's text, the musical also had two major Hollywood productions from which to draw inspiration, each of which had already made their own particular marks on popular culture and the public's perception of the tale. There's the much-loved 1971 film Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory, directed by Mel Stuart and starring Gene Wilder as the capricious confectioner, and Tim Burton's 2005 take on the story, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, starring Johnny Depp (not quite so well-loved, although it is remembered, if for no other reason then for Depp's performance flummoxing absolutely everybody who saw it). The musical worked in some obvious shout-outs to the 1971 film, but there are also more allusions to the 2005 film than I think are often credited. Below, I've had a crack at compiling a definitive list of what came from which source, the common ground that all three adaptations share (independent of the book) and the narrative innovations unique to the musical.

 

Allusions to both the 1971 and 2005 films (but not the book):

• In the original novel, Dahl never specified the nationalities of the Golden Ticket winners (curiously, he did specify that Charlotte Russe, the submitter of the fake Golden Ticket, was from Russia, but then look at the name he gave her), yet the 1971 film, 2005 film and 2013 musical have all been overwhelmingly consistent in depicting Augustus as German, Veruca as British and Violet and Mike as American (although their exact locations tend to vary). One of the rare deviations from this pattern was in the musical's Broadway retooling, which recast Veruca as Russian, possibly to go with the ballet motif the musical gave her - otherwise, the kids just fit the aforementioned national stereotypes so perfectly that it seems almost sacrilege for them to be presented as anything else.
• The stage musical, much like the 1971 and 2005 film adaptations, implements some element of rivalry between Violet and Veruca. In the 1971 film, the two girls openly squabble with one another during the tour, while in the 2005 film they make an ostensible gesture of friendship, before Veruca visibly enjoys watching Violet's downfall (based on one of the TV spots, I believe their rivalry originally got a whole lot dirtier, in ways not included in the final cut). In the West End musical, it's actually Violet who starts it, since she explicitly insults Veruca in the lyrics of her introductory song, "The Double Bubble Duchess" (and later "The Queen of Pop", which replaced it for the Broadway version). Veruca ultimately returns the favour by taunting Violet during the "Juicy!" sequence. 
• Both movies deviate from the book in having each of the children be accompanied by only one adult (presumably in the interests of cast decluttering), although between them there is some variation in which of their parents get to go on the tour. The West End musical adheres to the model of the 1971 film, where the bad nuts were each accompanied by the parent of the gender opposite to their own, and this was retained for the Broadway transfer. The UK tour mixed things up in having Violet be accompanied by her mother, bringing it more into line with the 2005 film - which remains, to my knowledge, the only major adaptation to date where Mike is accompanied by his father. (Note: in the West End musical, Mr Gloop, Mrs Beauregarde and Mr Teavee all have cameos in their family's respective introduction songs, but Mrs Salt is nowhere to be seen. She does, however, get a mention in "Veruca's Nutcracker Sweet".)
• In the book it was Mrs Salt who professed to be a geography teacher and challenged Wonka on the existence of Loompaland - but of course, she never goes on the tour in adaptations. In her place, it seems to be tradition to delegate this honor to whichever of Mike's parents is along for the ride.
• Speaking of the parents' professions, the detail about Mr Gloop being a butcher is included in both movies and the West End musical, but not the original novel.
  

Allusions to the 1971 film:

• The most obvious means by which the West End musical borrowed from the 1971 film was the inclusion of its most celebrated song, "Pure Imagination" - the ONLY pre-existing musical number to be incorporated into the original London production. In the 1971 film, Wonka sings it to the group at the start of the tour, after leading them into the Chocolate Room, while the West End musical relocates it to the narrative's climax, as Wonka and Charlie are flying in the Glass Elevator. When the musical was reworked for Broadway in 2017, one of the most significant changes made was to incorporate even more songs from the 1971 film (presumably to entice more of the nostalgia crowd, and to appease those who view the 1971 film as the "default" version), including "The Candy Man", "I've Got A Golden Ticket" and a variation on "The Oompa Loompa Song". "Pure Imagination" was also moved the Chocolate Room sequence, replacing "Simply Second Nature", to better correspond with where it occurs in the 1971 film, while a new song, "The View From Here", was written for the Glass Elevator sequence. The UK tour moved to undo a few of these changes and to restore some of the excised West End material, although "The Candy Man" and "The Oompa Loompa Song" were retained. That's another aspect of the Broadway overhaul that I seriously don't dig, as I personally feel it was a huge mistake to make the musical too indebted to the 1971 film over letting it be its own thing. The original West End production did a fine and convincing job of incorporating "Pure Imagination" into its take on the story, but the others have the conspicuous air of being shoehorned in after the fact. "Candy Man" might be catchy and iconic on its own terms, but its upbeat, old-fashioned flavour sticks out like a sore thumb amid the darker, more contemporary tones of the West End score, and while "The Oompa Loompa Song" still touches a number of raw childhood nerves in me, I happen to think the original introduction to "Auf Wiedersehen Augustus Gloop" was far funnier ("He was not obedient, now he is an ingredient!"). The UK tour also kept "Pure Imagination" in the Chocolate Room, which bothers me less, but I sincerely hope we haven't seen the last of "Simply Second Nature". It's the part of the musical where Wonka gets to bear his soul in a way that's authentically touching, with one or two unsettling Wonka-isms thrown in along the way.
• At the beginning of "It Must Be Believed To Be Seen", West End Wonka makes an entrance similar to Wilder's Wonka, by feigning a limp.
  
• "Strike that, reverse it", here the basis of an entire song, and repeated by Wonka throughout the narrative, was a catchphrase originating with Wilder's Wonka, not Dahl's (although Dahl's Wonka did use it in Charlie and The Great Glass Elevator, which was published a year after Stuart's film).
  
• Much like Wilder's Wonka, West End Wonka requires his visitors to sign a contract before allowing them into the factory.
• The West End depiction of Mike draws more heavily from his characterisation in the book and the 2005 film. There's very little that specifically references Mike '71, as portrayed by Paris Themmen, although the reference to his favourite video game hero, Captain Knuckleduster, being of the "futuristic rodeo" feels like it was implemented as a nod to that incarnation's specific fascination with westerns. (The name "Captain Knuckleduster" itself, meanwhile, derives from his book counterpart's addiction to gangster movies and to their championing of the weapon in question.)
• As in the 1971 film, Mr Salt intentionally throws himself down the chute along with Veruca. In the book and 2005 film he was pushed down by the squirrels.
• After Mike has been shrunken down in the Television Room, Mrs Teavee contains him by putting him into her purse, as she does in the 1971 film (in the book, Mr Teavee subdues Mike - having caused him to throw a tantrum - by putting him into his shirt pocket, while in the 2005 film Mike is comparatively docile and doesn't show any kind of panic or resistance after being removed from Wonka's television). West End Mike is less resourceful than Mike '71, and doesn't threaten to fight back using items found inside his mother's purse.
  
• In the book, as soon as Mike has gotten himself eliminated from the tour, Wonka openly declares Charlie the winner and reveals his ulterior motive for distributing the Golden Tickets. This is more-or-less what happens in the 2005 film (drawn-out epilogue with Christopher Lee notwithstanding). In the 1971 film, things go down slightly differently, as Charlie still needs to pass one final test to prove himself to Wonka. The same is true in the musical, although the nature of the test differs. In both cases, Wonka indicates that he doesn't intend to give Charlie the promised lifetime supply of candy, much to the indignation of Joe, who contends that he has treated Charlie unfairly, while Charlie himself manages to contain his disappointment graciously. The everlasting gobstopper, a passing curiosity in the book and the 2005 film, has greater significance to the resolution of the 1971 film and the West End musical (as a red herring in the latter's case). Compared to the book, where Charlie was basically crowned the winner by default (two sweetest words in the English language, as Homer Simpson would have it), this gives Charlie a bit more active agency in determining the final outcome. I know Dahl wasn't ecstatic about some of the changes the 1971 film made to his story, but let's face it - in the default version, Charlie is a bit of a milksop (something the 2005 film merely accentuated), and I think it's far more satisfying to see him put to the test in some way before he gets his factory. The 1971 film and West End musical did alright by me.
  
• Another change made for the Broadway retooling was to eliminate the character of Mr Bucket, so that Mrs Bucket became the family's sole breadwinner - which is more in line with the 1971 film, where Charlie's father wasn't on the scene. This change was retained for the UK tour. 

Allusions to the 2005 film:

• The West End musical didn't take a whole lot from the 2005 film when it came to the characterisation of Wonka or Charlie - which is fine by me, since I'm not overly fond of how Burton's film represented either of them. There's nothing in the musical regarding Wonka's dentist daddy issues (the only reference made to his childhood is during one verse of "It Must Be Believed To Be Seen", when he tells the visiting party, "My childhood home was bland like yours"), nor is Charlie such a ghastly goody two-shoes that he has to be talked out of selling his Golden Ticket by his family. So much the better. Where the influence is obvious is with the bad nuts; the 2005 film provided a much better model for depicting them as modern children with modern vices, and in the musical they generally feel a lot closer in spirit to their 00s counterparts than to their 70s. The one exception is Veruca, who doesn't appear to have taken much specifically from either her 1971 or 2005 depictions, outside of her aforementioned rivalry with Violet.
• An aspect of Charlie's character that was lifted from the 2005 film is his propensity for hoarding the wrappers of Wonka bars.
  
• A general plot point carried over from the 2005 film is the idea that the children are aware, going into the factory, that there is an even bigger prize up for grabs and that one of them will emerge as the overall victor. In the book and 1971 film all five ticket winners were promised a lifetime supply of candy in addition to the tour (a promise Wonka actually made good on in the book), with the special prize of the factory itself being the story's big twist, revealed only to Charlie at the end. In the 2005 film, Depp's Wonka advertises upfront that there will be an extra prize for just one of the children...which frankly strikes me as something of a dick move on his part. In theory, shouldn't it have been about giving these kids a fun day out, instead of encouraging them to feel like they were in competition with each other the whole time? West End Wonka at least drops them an anvil-sized hint as to what he's looking for ("For in the end there's quite a prize, if you can see with more than eyes!").
• A possible reference to the 2005 film, albeit one implemented somewhat confusingly, are the circumstances under which Mr Bucket loses his job at the toothpaste factory. He tells Charlie that "the toothpaste factory's closed", which is true to what happened in the novel. Joe then mutters "Blooming machines!" My immediate assumption would have been that the factory closed because the machinery broke down, but maybe it's a roundabout reference to how machinery rendered Mr Bucket's job obsolete, as in the Burton film. Either way, technology is to blame.
  

Now for those bad nuts:

• In the song "More of Him To Love", the circumstances under which Augustus describes finding his Golden Ticket are the exact same as in the 2005 film. He bit into a Wonka bar and unwittingly started to eat the ticket, before noticing that the taste was off. "So I spit it out, and saw I had struck gold!"
• One of the more successful changes made in Burton's film was to reframe the vices of Violet, as portrayed by Annasophia Robb - her gum-chewing habit is retained, but rather than focussing on it as though it were the most distasteful thing about her, it's treated as part of a broader personality flaw, and this is something the West End musical blatantly took notes on. Like Violet '05, West End Violet is ultra competitive and obsessed with winning  - a trait implicit in the novel, where Violet took immense pride in her gum-chewing record and had a rival, Cornelia Prinzmetel (Cornelia is mentioned in the 1971 film and 2013 musical, though curiously not in the 2005 film), but it was the 2005 film that really brought this to the foreground. It's also obvious that she's been pushed into this mindset by an exploitative parent who is essentially using her as an outlet for their own egotistical ambitions (in the West End version it's her father rather than her mother). Gum addiction aside, there are some notable differences in how the two incarnations choose to express their competitive cravings - Violet '05 was into judo and the acquisition of endless sporting trophies, whereas West End Violet is more interested in vapid celebrity, being a commentary on those media personalities who are "famous for being famous" (the Broadway version, meanwhile, made her a YouTube influencer). In both cases, the gum-chewing might not constitute the root of the problem in itself, but is emblematic of the intrinsic absurdity of Violet's obsession with making herself stand out.
  
• In the UK tour, Mr Beauregarde was swapped out for Ms Beauregarde. I can confirm that the character, as played by Julie Mullins, was blatantly modelled on Ms Beauregarde as played by Missi Pyle. She had a similar jogging suit and everything.
  
• When Violet first encounters Wonka during "Strike That, Reverse It", she tells him, "Just let me in, I'm here to win!" - recalling her insistence, on meeting him in the 2005 film, that she was going to win the special prize. West End Wonka, like Depp's Wonka, responds by acknowledging her inflated confidence ("Your confidence is quite intense, but just don't jump the gum!").
• Likewise, there's a lot about West End Mike that was clearly influenced by his 2005 counterpart (not least, his pastime of choice being updated to playing video games as opposed to watching television per se), although their basic demeanors are fairly different - Mike '05, as portrayed by Jordan Fry, is a generally reserved child prone to intermittent displays of aggression, whereas West End Mike is an absolute hurricane of hyperactive chaos who can't seem to stop causing trouble for those around him. Their attire is notably similar - like Mike '05, West End Mike wears a shirt with a skull design. He also wears camo trousers, which Mike '05 wore during the scene at his family's home (although not to the factory itself).
• Throughout "It's Teavee Time!", Mike signs off his verses with the refrain, "This is the life, now die!", a line amalgamating his impressions of the gangster lifestyle in the book ("It's the life, I tell you!"), and his eccentricity, in the 2005 film, of screaming "Die!" at the computer screen.
  
• One of Mike '05's defining traits was his precociousness; West End Mike doesn't flaunt it in the same way, but the circumstances under which he obtained his ticket would imply that he is similarly advanced for his age. In the 2005 film, Mike deciphered the location of the fourth Golden Ticket using a complex mathematical equation that apparently came very easily to him. In the West End musical, he also uses his technological prowess to secure a ticket, but in a way more reflective of this incarnation's gravitation toward chaos - he straight-up admits to having hacked into Wonka's computer system. In the 2005 film, Mike tells the press that "In the end, I only had to buy one candy bar", while West End Mike goes a step further and boasts that he "never had to buy a bar" (however that worked). On the subject of candy bars, Mike '05 vocally disliked the taste of chocolate. West End Mike is also of the opinion that "chocolate sucks", although he is momentarily disarmed by the marshmallow flowers in Wonka's Chocolate Room.
• In the book we had the running gag where Mike would persistently question Wonka, who in turn would rebuff Mike by pretending not to understand him. This was somewhat downplayed in the 1971 film, but accentuated in the 2005 film, where Mike's interactions with Wonka were given an overall more antagonistic edge. The West End musical followed the model of making the Wonka/Mike dynamic more overtly antagonistic, something they went even harder with in the Broadway and UK tour productions, where Mike is the one who refuses to go along with Wonka's philosophy of "It must be believed to be seen."
  
• The most direct call-out to the 2005 film occurs during "Strike That, Reverse It", when Mike and Wonka first cross paths. In the original West End production, Wonka asks Mike to explain to him "just how you cracked my system", the wording being strikingly similar to when Depp's Wonka addresses Fry's Mike as "the little devil who cracked the system". In the Broadway retooling they changed Wonka's question to "how you hacked your ticket", providing the set-up for a slightly different response from Mike, but unfortunately torpedoing the reference. Then the UK tour production, for some reason, removed the references to Mike's hacking practices altogether.

Changes exclusive to the musical:

It's here that I should address the single most unsettling change made by the West End production - in this version, we don't actually know for certain if three of the bad kids survived. Some people will tell you that Augustus, Violet and Veruca/Mr Salt die in the musical, but it's really more accurate to say that their fates are left hanging. We don't find out what happens to them, and the musical gives out distinctively mixed signals as to how we should interpret that. You might be thinking that's not so different to the 1971 film, which doesn't definitively show us what becomes of the other children, but there Wilder's Wonka was at least at pains to reassure us that they would all be okay. West End Wonka, meanwhile, seems only too happy to leave us in the dark. There's enough ambiguity that you could potentially have it either way - the Oompa Loompas get exceedingly gruesome, in their song lyrics, describing the hypothetical fates awaiting the children, most notably with Augustus and Violet (egad, are they ever gruesome with Violet) but then the Oompa Loompas have always been full of hyperbole, and while Wonka blatantly has a sick sense of humor, just how sick is open to interpretation. Really, who understands how anything works in his nightmare of a factory? Whichever way you slice it, there are some bothersome loose ends in the West End musical, since we also don't find out what happens to some of the non-endangered characters. I would presume that when Mrs Teavee carries the shrunken Mike off of stage, they left the factory. They went back home, to suburbia. But what of Mrs Gloop and Mr Beauregarde? Were they still wandering the factory, anxiously trying to chase up what became of their children as Charlie and his family were moving in? And if you're mean-minded enough to theorise that they were whacked behind the scenes...they do each have spouses back in Bavaria/California who are going to cry foul somewhere down the line. Since Wonka is in such a hurry to get away at the end of the musical (see below), one way of looking at it is that he's just scarpered and left Charlie to deal with a deluge of backstage trauma. The morbidness of the musical doesn't stop with the uncertainty regarding the children's fates, as Charlie's grandparents claim that Prince Pondicherry and his girlfriend died in this particular recounting of their story. Heck, there are some who interpret the final visual trick to mean that Wonka himself dies at the end. The stench of impending death is all around us!

If I'm frank, this ambiguity is the one aspect of the West End musical that really tested my sensibilities. It's contrary to the book, which was dark, but not that dark, and made it crystal clear that all of the children survived their experiences; I also don't believe that these kids did anything so egregiously evil as to make death an even remotely proportionate comeuppance. Augustus and Violet's respective exits are arguably too silly and over the top to take particularly seriously, but the one I do think pushes the boundaries of bad taste is that of Veruca and Mr Salt (and if Veruca is dead, then the Oompa Loompas straight-up murdered her, since technically they drop her down the chute in this version and not the squirrels). Then again, in this house we stan Mike Teavee, and I can't help but feel such overwhelming gratitude that he's the one child who isn't last seen in a life-threatening predicament. The million dollar question is, would the West End musical still be my favourite adaptation if it had treated Mike in a similar manner? I'll admit that it would likely have been a deal-breaker. You touch Mike, and it suddenly feels a whole lot more personal.

I've heard it said that the West End production originally planned to include a reprise of "Strike That, Reverse It" in which each of the families were seen leaving the factory, thus confirming that they all got out in one piece, but this didn't make it into the final presentation. I've yet to see an official source on that, but in the UK tour production, I did pick up on a small change made to the lyrics of the familiar "Strike That, Reverse It" that I think gives credibility to that claim. Wonka's exchange with Veruca was completely different, swapping out his comments about her baby harp seal coat for something it would honestly make a lot more sense for him to say to her at the end of the story, after her ordeal in the bad nut chute (Veruca: "I will jeté the other way!", Wonka: "Just don't stink up the joint!"). It does sound to me like Veruca's is looking to get to the hell out of there, while Wonka is mocking her for her garbage-inflicted odor, so I do have to wonder...were those lyrics taken from the alleged reprise? The mere thought that it might have existed is seriously a load off my mind, since it implies that Greig and co didn't set out with the mindset of, "You know how this story could have been improved? If a few of those children had actually snuffed it!"

Another small but all-important change made for the UK tour production (one I'm surprised not to have seen more people comment upon) is that Wonka does actually assure Charlie during the Glass Elevator sequence that the other kids are all alive and on their way home, if "changed" in some way (again, Mike is the only child for whom we have any insight into what he means by that). We still only have Wonka's word to go on, so if you're one of those sickos who's absolutely determined to believe otherwise then I suppose you can still have your way, but it makes a huge difference to the aftertaste you go away with, and I do wish that the West End musical had had the prudence to also include a moment of this nature. For all the concern Charlie expressed throughout the tour regarding the welfare of the other children, it bothered profoundly me that he seemed to forget all about them once he'd climbed aboard that elevator.

But enough of my ranting. Here are the other musical-exclusive changes:

• Veruca's passion for ballet was introduced just for the musical. The intention was to give each of the children their own signature musical style, and ballet music works as a reflection of Veruca's higher class social status while facilitating a "Nutcracker Suite" pun that goes along nicely with her father's profession and her fateful squirrel troubles.
  
• The Beauregardes are now an African American family, in the interests of a more diverse cast. I'm surprised it took until 2013 for them to try switching things up, and that Warner Bros thought it perfectly acceptable for the Depp film to feature an all-white main cast just eight years prior, but then I guess Burton's "aesthetic" was always a sticking point.
  
• The musical has a new recurring character, Cherry Sundae, who conducts press interviews with all of the ticket winners.
  
• Mike's TV-induced shrinkage in the musical is apparently permanent. Wonka doesn't offer to stretch him back to his regular size, and Mrs Teavee, while initially horrified, quickly comes around to the idea, since Mike has been restored to what she sees as his ideal state - small, helpless and with no real capacity to resist her desire to cosset him 24/7. Such is the peculiar trade-off I get with the musical - a lot of disturbing ambiguity regarding the rest of the children, and for my favourite character, an outcome I actually like better than the default version. I mean, it's touching how his mother basically just wants to take care of him, and we sidestep that entire nasty business with the taffy-puller and come away feeling that something was actually resolved within the dynamics of the Teavee household. Mike and his mother are certainly now a lot tighter, whether Mike's happy about that or not (compare this to the 2005 film, where he and his father still weren't communicating by the tour's end). That it happens to be the musical's funniest moment doesn't hurt it either.
  
• If you come away from ANY version of this story wondering if Wonka planned for all of these horrifying "accidents" to happen and if he knew from the outset that Charlie would be the winner, then that's a silly question - of course he did. The West End musical goes a fair bit further with the idea, implying that Wonka has been observing Charlie for some time (under the guise of a homeless man he meets at various points throughout the play) and that the whole thing was orchestrated exclusively for Charlie's benefit. At the end of the tour, Wonka leaves Charlie in his Imagination Room with the notebook in which he jots down all of his ideas, but warns Charlie not to touch it. Charlie can't resist the urge, and is inspired to add a few new ideas of his own. Wonka returns and, impressed by Charlie's irrepressible creativity, reveals to him that he just passed the test. The chilling implication is that Wonka might have set up the other children just to test whether or not Charlie, after witnessing their respective downfalls, would still be willing to break the rules for the sake of his creative expression. So yes, the musical does effectively reward Charlie for an act of disobedience, but it's the type of disobedience that marks him out as Wonka's soulmate.
  
• Unlike the book and both of the movies, where Wonka intends to take Charlie under his wing and mentor him in his assorted chocolate-making techniques, Wonka doesn't actually stay with Charlie at the musical's end. Assuming the anonymity of the homeless man, he makes his slippery exit, extending the warning to the audience that "that may be Willy Wonka by your side". Now that is a truly horrifying thought to send us all home with.
  
• One of the most striking innovations of the recent UK tour was the depiction of the Oompa Loompas, who've been a persistent subject of controversy from about as far back as the book's publication (since the implication is that Wonka found a tribe of pygmies and roped them into becoming his slave labor/human guinea pigs, all while passing himself off as their white savoir). The UK tour elected to sidestep this altogether by reimagining the Oompa Loompas as mechanical beings (presumably created by Wonka himself) and removing the backstory about Loompaland. For what it's worth, I thought the metal Oompa Loompas were pretty cool; they were unsettling, but in a way I found enjoyable for once, and they had a presence and an aesthetic that really helped set them apart from previous incarnations. If this was the future direction we'd be going with the Oompa Loompas, I was frankly all for it. Then the first Wonka trailer dropped, and Hugh Grant seemed to shoot that possibility to shit; apparently we're back to little orange people again.
  
• Another change made during the UK tour, but one I fully expect to stick around for future productions, is that Charlie can now be played by either boys or girls. Again, I'm only surprised that this one was so long in coming. The name Charlie is already gender-neutral, the character's gender doesn't have any bearing on plot and, as a bonus, it doesn't make the gender divide among the ticket winners any more imbalanced than it was before...so why not?

 

Allusions to other Dahl works:

• The candy vendor in the West End musical is named Mrs Pratchett, a nod to the sweet shop-owner described in Dahl's 1984 autobiography Boy as the source of much childhood angst, disgust and loathing among Dahl and his friends. One day they decided to prank her by leaving a dead mouse in one of her jars, and it just got uglier from there.

 

 

Of course, something that none of these adaptations have yet accomplished is to incorporate the particular detail of Mike showing up to the factory with 18 toy guns strapped to his body. So that's a challenge still open to the next depiction of the character, whenever he's arriving. I'm guessing it won't be in the upcoming Wonka, since that movie clearly takes place some decades before the any of the children were born (barring some kind of flash-forward). In which case, it's over to you, Netflix, and your "animated series event" (once again, I am a little apprehensive as to what they actually have in store, but we shall see).

[1] Then again, Mike, Augustus, Violet and Veruca aren't in the sequel, so that's a massive strike against it. If they are going to keep expanding the Charlie IP then the thing I'd really like to see is a Bad Nut spin-off. I figure we can only have so much focus on Wonka for so long before it has to occur to somebody with the power.

Grade School Confidential (aka Where Does The Time Go?)

 

I'm continuing in my mission to get more of Season 8 covered before 2023 is through - and for now, no, I won't be focussing on any of the really obvious heavy-hitters. I promise you, I'll get round to "You Only Move Twice" and "Homer's Enemy" eventually, but Season 8 being such an underrated season in general, I think it's only appropriate that I rivet my efforts upon making the case for the more underrated episodes. Hence this look at "Grade School Confidential" (episode 4F09), which debuted on April 6th 1997, Springfield's classic tale of love and licentiousness from inside the school janitor's closet. This is yet another episode that I think is all too often overlooked, in terms of its narrative richness and character building; at the same time, there is something about the resolution that frankly bugs me and that I think warrants discussion with regard to the assumptions behind it, so there's your heads-up.

"Grade School Confidential" is in some respects a very characteristic specimen of the Oakley-Weinstein era, while in others it feels like a total outlier. It continues the showrunners' interest, initiated in the previous season's "Homer The Smithers", in wanting to create stories that focused more on the private lives of peripheral characters - as with that episode, a member of the Simpsons family is caught up in the middle of the proceedings, yet his stakes are not where the narrative interest lies. It was during this period that the series seemed to have really acquired the confidence to take advantage of its diverse supporting cast, and the assorted narrative possibilities they suggested ("22 Short Films About Springfield" was structured on the premise, however facetious, that any one of the townspeople could have been the star, in their own alternate reality sitcom), with Season 8 devoting multiple episodes to exploring hitherto unknown regions of our tertiary line-up, delving into who they were and what made them tick outside of what they represented to the title clan. Not all of these were entirely successful (the backstory ascribed to Ned Flanders in "Hurricane Neddy" remains, at best, a divisive one), but others definitely left the Simpsons universe feeling like a richer, better-rounded place. We had glimpses into Kirk and Luann's troubled home life, into an especially prickly branch of Sideshow Bob's family tree, and a deluge of development for Moe following years in which he'd only had one real focal episode. And this wonderful installment, in which Skinner and Edna, two long-term card-carrying members of Springfield's Lonely Hearts Club, discover that the solution to their mutual predicament might have been right there under their noses this entire time. Here's the sense in which "Grade School Confidential" seems to break from the general mood of Season 8 - it is fundamentally an optimistic episode that celebrates the possibility of a new beginning, a quality that makes it the philosophical opposite of both "A Milhouse Divided" (which acknowledges the necessity for change, but through the breakdown of a relationship) and "Brother From Another Series" (which teases the possibility that Bob might actually escape his vicious cycle of release and relapse, only to cruelly snatch it away from him at the end). Season 8 was an intelligent and adventurous series that knew how to play around with its own formula, but a word that I don't think many would use to describe it, on the whole, is "sincere". This was a time when the series had gotten a whole lot more snarky and cynical about its own ongoing existence, and a great chunk of the episodes seemed to have been spawned from places of unrelenting sardonicism, or at least have quotation marks around them. At its most extreme, this resulted in some of the series' most notoriously dark developments ("Frank Grimes, or Grimey as he liked to be called..."), while even some of the more unassuming premises, which feel like they could have fit comfortably into earlier seasons, such as "My Sister, My Sitter", venture into considerably meaner-spirited territory than one could picture from the show's younger days. I've made it known that Season 8 is my personal favourite, but I do have to admit that it doesn't always make for great comfort viewing.

Stemming that tide is "Grade School Confidential", which has an earnestness that quite sneaks up on you. Rachel Puldio's script is sharp, but sensitive. It seems genuinely interested in exploring the essences of adult loneliness and getting us genuinely invested in how Skinner and Edna each answer a need in the other that they had all but given up hope of being fulfilled. In that sense it feels like a throwback to the earlier, more grounded seasons that tended to favour understated melancholy amid the chuckles, and to the specific episodes that established the pair as respectively lost and abandoned in their yearning for a little intimate human company - namely, Season 2's "Principal Charming" and Season 3's "Bart The Lover". And yet it opens with a distinct air of world-weariness, of the kind that hung heavily over the latter half of Oakley and Weinstein's era. The jadedness and disappointment that forms the basis of Skinner and Krabby's early rapport springs from a somewhat gentler-tempered version of the same anxieties that birthed such acts of all-out desperation as Poochie the dog and The Love-Matic Grampa. These are characters who've been stuck in the same set roles and routine for so long (and back in 1997, eight years felt like an eternity in cartoon sitcom time) that the prospect of having to keep going indefinitely seems unbearable. The beginning of "Grade School Confidential" establishes time as our preliminary antagonist, as indicated in Martin's announcement that he'll be holding a lavish birthday party this coming weekend, a reminder of both the relentless march of time and of the emptiness and inertia that seems to characterise all of his associates' lives, regardless of their age (we suspect that most of the party attendants are there not because they care about ushering in yet another trip around the sun with Martin, but because none of them have anything better to do on a Saturday). Martin has only a minor role in this episode, but it's interesting nevertheless to go back and compare it to his input in "Bart Gets an F", where he seemed to represent the one golden cause for optimism amid Edna's waning enthusiasm for her educational career. Remember how thoroughly she dug his presentation on Ernest Hemingway? Come Season 8, and Edna's allegiances seem to have shifted. Her status as an authority figure might put her at odds with Bart, but we sense that she feels more sympathy for his position than she'd perhaps let on. She's just as fed up with the system, and with the feeling that she isn't moving anywhere in life, and each day within school grounds represents another form of personal entrapment for her, Martin included. Her response to this stagnation, up until now, has been to try getting as close to her unfulfilled dreams as humanly possible, through a hobby that involves writing to glamorous night clubs and asking them nicely to send her promotional match-books. So it's a tremendous irony that her liberation should arrive not from the glitzy club lifestyle she'd aspired to be a part of, however vicariously, but from the very inertia she'd been trying to transcend. Up until Martin's party, Skinner himself was just a part of the stagnation, his intercom interjections regarding how the bake sale to raise money for the car wash had been cancelled due to confusion virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the background drone.

Season 8 in general felt like the work of a creative team who'd been at this game for enough years to wonder if there were any genuine surprises still lurking on the horizon. Expended time is a theme that resonates all throughout "Grade School Confidential", most explicitly advertised in Edna's line, "Where does the time go?", but here it comes not so much from a place of arch sardonicism than a place of naked, authentically poignant regret. It plays upon a powerful sense sense of lost time, and the pained acknowledgement that things didn't work out as perhaps they should have done. This suggests a very different, more wistful side to this season's ongoing fixation on the show's mortality - that, far from scraping the barrel for fresh ideas, there was actually a whole lot more the team wished they could have accomplished with the series, but they were at the point now where things seemed to have already run their course and the window would soon be closing. What's heartening about the episode is that it actually yields a positive solution, and what feels like a genuinely sincere message about how it's never too late, no matter how far along you are in life, to embark on something new and life-changing. Skinner and Edna find love and companionship in sources that already seemed so tediously familiar they had scarcely even registered until now. Part of the episode's emphasis on lost time is rooted in the recognition that these characters spent eight whole seasons in a close proximity to one another, so why on earth didn't they attempt to make a deeper connection sooner? Was the answer to their problems really that glaringly obvious all along? Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood imply as much in I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide, when they credit the episode with "bring[ing] to fruition one of the series' longest running gags: Edna and Seymour's mutual attraction." I was inclined to question Martyn and Wood there (as often I do), because I'm not convinced this actually was one of the series' longest running gags. So far as I can tell, the only prior reference to their possibly becoming an item was in "Bart The Lover", where Bart cites Skinner as a potential suitor for Edna, only for her to shoot down the suggestion with the bitter postulation that, "Let's just say his mommy won't let him out to play!" But maybe Martyn and Wood did pick up on something legitimately there - according to the DVD commentary for "Grade School Confidential", it was an idea the series had been noodling around with since the days when Al Jean and Mike Reiss were showrunners. "Gaping unexplored plot avenue" might be a more accurate way of phrasing it. And I suspect the reason why a prospective Seymour/Edna romance never got off the ground during Jean and Reiss's run is because it was also around this time that the writers settled upon the characterisation of Skinner as a stifled mommy's boy, and this ended up taking precedent over giving the guy a love life (although Agnes was established as a character all the way back in Season 1, in "The Crepes of Wrath", she wasn't immediately cemented as having such a domineering hold on Skinner's life; in fact, she was completely absent from "Principal Charming" and Skinner's ill-fated pursuit of Patty). So Edna wasn't making excuses - it was indeed his mother who was keeping them apart.

More's the pity, because Skinner and Edna do make such a natural couple; their dynamic clicks straight off the bat, in a way that feels so honest and genuine. It's not hard to comprehend why these characters would be drawn to one another. There's a great deal they have in common; they're both intelligent, vulnerable people who've grown bored with their careers in education, and with the hands life has dealt them in general, and both of them hunger for a little human connection. They're also polar opposites right where it counts - Skinner is an innocent (how much of an innocent we will not learn until the episode's end), yet to truly discover all that he's capable of, while Edna has been around the block a few times and thinks she's seen it all. Each has a lot to bring in terms of refreshing and broadening the other's perspective. One of the episode's most heartfelt moments is when Skinner pays Edna the highest compliment he possibly can, in assuring her that she's nothing like the mother whose toxic influence he'd never imagined he could ever transcend: "I always thought I'd fall for a woman just like Mother, even though I didn't want to. And now that I haven't, I've discovered what true happiness can be."

I give additional credit to "Grade School Confidential" for being a rare episode to extend its middle finger to the status quo and have its developments stick, in spite of going through all the motions of pretending to reach for the reset button near the end. Edna and Skinner play a trick on Bart, and by extension the viewer, in the final minute when they tell him they've decided to break off their relationship. Once Bart has left the building, they return to their favourite make out spot, inside the janitor's closet, and laugh about the child's gullibility. This wasn't the first time a Season 8 episode would pull one of these fake-out "We're going to restore the status quo - PSYCH, actually, we're not!" endings - see also "A Milhouse Divided", which looks momentarily as if it might rescind Kirk and Luann's divorce, only to brusquely double down on it right before the credits. Here, though, there's an unmitigated sense of triumph in the sleight of hand. Releasing Bart from his privilege/obligation as the couple's confidante is indicative of Skinner and Edna's desire to move on from the missteps made throughout this episode, but their commitment to one another is not one of them; they come out renewed in their mutual affections. Although the viewer is initially tricked alongside Bart, they are then made complicit in the revelation that Skinner and Edna's relationship will persevere; it serves as a confirmation that Skinner and Edna have successfully taken back their privacy, but also a little knowing wink to the viewer that there is something beautifully, radically subversive in the acknowledgement that these characters make a good couple and yes, they should be allowed to keep what they've gained for the foreseeable future. And so they did. It all ended on an absolute bummer, with Edna ditching Seymour and marrying Ned Flanders, shortly before Marcia Wallace's death in 2013 necessitated her character's sudden removal from the series, off-screen. The whole Nedna thread reached a dead end before it had even started, accomplishing little more than the unfortunate feat of making Ned a widower twice over (and if Edna hadn't married Ned, then would they have gone so far as to kill her off in-universe? Could they have gotten away with having her quietly fade out of the picture, as they did with Phil Hartman's characters?). But for now, let's just focus on the relationship's hopeful beginnings. Unambiguously happy endings were seriously something of a rarity in Season 8, so we should enjoy the moment instead of dwelling excessively on what's ahead.

At first, Skinner and Edna feel bound by the obligation to keep their relationship a secret. Despite being previously cited as the single biggest obstacle to a relationship with Skinner, Agnes is actually less of a factor in this than you might expect. She interferes with Skinner's early attempts to strike up a conversation with Edna, and Skinner later has Bart distract her as he goes on a date with Edna, but she has no role at all to play in the third act conflict - whether Skinner would be able to stand up to his mother specifically for Edna is not tested. The bigger issue is Skinner and Edna's fear that the outside world would judge their workplace-based romance as a conflict of interest (the complication being that Skinner is technically Edna's superior). The first hurdle they encounter is in the discovery that Bart witnessed them kissing at Martin's party, and is only too gleeful to have dirt on two of his regular adversaries; they convince him to keep his mouth shut in exchange for switching his permanent record with Milhouse's, and use him as a go-between in facilitating their assorted liaisons. As the romance between our two love birds blossoms, they become so wrapped up in themselves that they begin to take advantage of Bart's complicity, eventually prompting him to expose their secret to the entire school. From there, things spiral into the territory of the uncontrollable scandal; several children return home with stories implying the teacher and principal were outright fucking in the janitor's closet, resulting in such furore that Chalmers moves to fire them both. Bart, regretting his part in this outcome, reaffirms himself as an ally to Skinner and Edna, convincing them to barricade themselves inside the school in protest of both the loss of their jobs and the town's negative reaction to their relationship. Other than cooking up sufficient media interest in the matter, Bart doesn't prove massively essential in how the resolution plays out, but it's nice that he stands beside Skinner and Edna throughout their protest, in a show of solidarity. Mostly, though, it's the solidarity Skinner has found in Edna that gives him the backbone to rebel against the judgement of Springfield at large. This does not come naturally to Skinner, something he highlights early on when he comments that if there's one lesson life has taught him repeatedly, it's to know when he's beaten. The problem, as Bart explicitly points out, is that Skinner has grown accustomed to the idea that he's only capable of following orders, be it from his mother, the army or Chalmers. His devotion to Edna is what unlocks his greatest untapped potential of all, in revealing to him that he does have it in him to be defiant. It builds to an ending that is both tender and heartfelt and also a little questionable. And by "a little questionable", I of course mean that it might be considered aphobic AF.

I'm referring to the fact that Skinner is ultimately able to dispel the angry mob by publicly revealing himself to be a virgin in his mid-40s; the townspeople find this so shockingly embarrassing that they agree Skinner wouldn't own up to it falsely and beat an awkward retreat. In narrative terms, it's an elegant way of resolving our conflict and setting Skinner and Edna free from the glare of public salacity. Outside of universe, the implications of this ending do leave us with a lot to unpack - the main point of contention being that it rests on an assumption that's honestly degrading to asexuals; this idea that if you haven't taken an active interest in sex by a certain age, then there's something wrong with you (I am not suggesting that asexuals are invariably virgins, mind, just that the ending positions sex as something that adults should be invariably into). I think Erik Adams does a wonderfully succinct job, in his review on The AV Club, of encapsulating both what's lovely and what's potentially problematic about the ending when he observes that, "It quells the furor of the Helen Lovejoys in the crowd, but it also displays Seymour’s devotion to Edna. He cares so much about her, he’s willing to sacrifice whatever remains of his dignity." My question here is why, exactly, is Skinner's dignity being sacrificed? Is it because he was forced to go public with information about his personal life that was frankly never the townspeople's business, and that would naturally be degrading to anyone's privacy? Or are we expected to agree with Chalmers' assessment that virginity is not a quality any self-respecting adult would consider acceptable or aspirational? (I mean, Chalmers is obviously wrong - even putting aside asexuality, there are also people for whom sexual abstinence would be a requirement for religious/vocational reasons.) On the one hand, the revelation that Skinner is a virgin doesn't feel like a cheat, nor a betrayal of his character (which, you know, is more than we can say for a certain other Skinny revelation that wasn't far on the horizon). It fits in perfectly with the observation made by Edna at the start of the episode, when she notes that there's an innocence about the man that's rather charming. At his heart, Skinner is fundamentally a child; his adult life has been so dominated by his mother that he's never had the opportunity for physical intimacy with another individual. It is, nevertheless, perhaps a little disappointing that Pulido's script, for all of its intelligence and sensitivity, would boil down to an assumption as narrow-minded as that of the middle-aged virgin as a figure immediately inviting judgement and derision, as opposed to someone who might just never have been interested in sex in the first place. The obvious counterpoint is that Skinner's sexual preferences are not intended to be representative of asexuality, that he clearly does feel sexual attraction to Edna and that "Grade School Confidential" is all about his journey in slowly being able to open up and discover a part of himself that, up until now, he hasn't had the space or confidence to explore. That, on its own terms, is a beautiful bit of character progression for Skinner. But arguably, it also reinforces another common prejudice against asexuals - that they are repressed individuals who could be brought around to sexual attraction if they simply met the "right" person. Whichever way you slice it, sex is upheld as the ultimate end-goal of adult development - we are given reason to believe that Skinner will lose his virginity that very night (the sound of the champagne bottle popping is about as subtle a metaphor as the tunnel-bound train at the end of North By Northwest), and while that's great in terms of his relationship with Edna, it also eradicates his laudable non-conformity in being an adult virgin, and willing to admit to it.

Don't get me wrong, though. "Grade School Confidential" is still one of my favourite episodes of Season 8, and I want to be very clear that my talk of the possible aphobic assumptions therein do not represent any efforts on my part to get the episode cancelled or whatnot. I should also emphasise that I don't believe The Simpsons to be any worse than most other media when it comes to a lack of acknowledgement or validation given to asexuality. It's simply a discussion I've been wanting to have for a while now, particularly since I think there is a broader debate to be had specifically regarding the Simpsons' relationship with the issue. There is at least one other Simpsons episode that could be seen as harboring aphobic undertones, albeit mostly retroactively in its case, and that would be "Principal Charming", the episode that first explored Skinner's non-existent love life. Here, it isn't Skinner's sexual leanings that are the point of interest, but Patty Bouvier's - this episode revolves around her considering a possible long-term relationship with Skinner, but ultimately rejecting him out of loyalty to her twin sister. Patty would later come out as a lesbian, in Season 16's "There's Something About Marrying", and fans often credit "Principal Charming" with being the first episode to properly hint at this, by establishing her lack of sexual interest in men. The thing is, "Principal Charming" doesn't actually indicate that Patty has any sexual interest in women, either - in Homer's words, she "doesn't like to be...touched", which on its own terms would strike me as more suggestive of asexuality - and this is where the retroactive aphobia enters in. The absence of interest in the opposite sex is automatically taken to be indicative of interest in the same sex, as opposed to the possibility of a lack of sexual interest, period. And since this outlook was verified in subsequent episodes, it reinforces the prejudice that asexuality should be seen as a sign of repression, as opposed to being a valid sexual preference and identity in itself. There were certainly a number of positives in Patty's lesbianism becoming canon, not least that lesbians gained additional representation through the character (of course, the specific episode in which she explicitly outs herself does have its own particular problem with transphobia, but I won't be getting into that today). But there is also a negative side, in that asexuals lost out on some potential representation, particularly given that asexuality is still so poorly represented in media in general. If you asked me to name a fictional character who was unequivocally asexual, I would honestly struggle - I had the titular character from the 1984 film Birdy pegged as a possible asexual, but it took some headcannoning on my part (and besides, I'm not sure you could describe him as as such, based on some of the things he gets up to in William Wharton's novel). Otherwise, I don't have much else I can offer.

But I digress. On balance, I come away with the feeling that "Grade School Confidential" is actually the less aphobic of the two, despite being the episode in which aphobic sentiments play an explicit role in the story's resolution. It comes down to the fact that, fundamentally, the story is on Skinner's side. Although Skinner is initially hesitant to admit to his virginity, when he does, he does so with total confidence, and with no visible shame on his part. He's aware that the townspeople are going to form their own judgements, but he's decided he can rise above it. Afterwards (Nelson's reaction notwithstanding), the embarrassment is entirely with the townspeople, who are basically getting their own salacious hypocrisies directed back at them. Their moral outcry against the scandal is, plainly, rooted in fascination - the discovery that there was never, in fact, any salacious detail to be had exposes their outrage for the voyeuristic lechery that it was. "That was more than I wanted to know" grumbles Lenny as he walks away - the implication that he finds Skinner's profession of virginity to be more distasteful than those allegations of "making babies" really speaks more of his licentious mindset, and all of Springfield's, than it does any actual indignity in Skinner being a virgin. The townspeople are the ones at fault, and they are left to stew in their own discomfort while Skinner and Edna are left in peace, and with the freedom to truly be themselves. We do still need to weigh this up against the fact that Skinner is implied to lose his virginity at the end, thus upholding the assumption that it is inherently something an adult should aspire to leave behind eventually. But the one thing Skinner does retain is his dignity - he simply forces the mob to confront its own messed-up thinking, and banishes them from the school grounds.

As a side-note, it's a bit odd that Homer and Marge just walk away with the crowd at the end. You'd think they would have hung around to get their son back. Instead, they leave Bart to find his own way home, the deadbeats.

Sky 1 edit alert!: Another victim of Sky 1's editing practices in the 90s was the moment where the townspeople hysterically pile on their accusations before Edna and Skinner (Dr Hibbert: "My child told me you two were having sex in the school janitor's closet!" Chief Wiggum: "You know, making babies?" Mr Prince: "Yes, illicit sex!" Helen Lovejoy: "Doing IT! IT! IT!" Sideshow Mel: "Sordid public sexual congress!"). Santa's Little Helper is also seen making off with Skinner's hot dog bomb, in what I presume is intended to be yet another highly conspicuous sexual metaphor. To be totally fair to Sky, this moment wasn't strictly necessary from a narrative standpoint - Maude Flanders' accusation about S-E-X in front of the C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N, which was retained (presumably because it was a little less blunt than the others), is all that's needed to coherently establish, to Skinner and Edna, what the town presumes to have been going on. But from a thematic standpoint, it is a bit of a loss, since it drives home the point about the townspeople being the truly salacious and sex-obsessed ones, and their outcry being so mindless and hollow. I am somewhat sorry that the 12-year-old me missed out on Mel's sexual congress tirade, but mainly just relieved that Krusty's "Sex Cauldron" bit survived the cut. Krusty and Maude make such a fabulous comedic dyad, who knew?

Oh, and here seems as good a place as any for a disclaimer about a piece I wrote nearly six years ago (where does the time go?), regarding a throwaway gag from this very episode. Remember this one, when I was trying to figure out if there was any deeper meaning to Chalmers' query about whether they actually filmed that movie in Atlanta? A while ago, in 2020, Bill Oakley told me on Twitter that the movie in question "definitely wasn't The Big Chill" - I wasn't inclined to save the tweet at the time, and besides I think that Oakley got his Twitter account nuked anyway amid some of the recent insanity (I'm finding it kind of hard to keep a pace of what's going on over there), but I thought it only right and proper that I acknowledge that he did indeed say that. That piece can continue to stand, however, as a testament to the absolute rabbit holes I can send myself down sometimes.

Two Weeks Vacation (aka Do Ya Need A Break From Modern Livin'?)

Somewhere within my family's vast collection of abysmal-quality VHS recordings from the late 1980s, there lurked a broadcast of the 1952 Disney short Two Weeks Vacation. As a child, I found myself drawn to this recording over and over, in part because the narrative cut-off point, where Goofy, in the midst of his quest for a fortnight's respite from the demands of the 9 to 5, settles down into a secluded motel bed, only to have the headlights of an approaching train blaring directly into his eyeballs, seemed such a baffling and arbitrary place to wrap things up. The appearance of the train, never explicitly explained with the dialogue, unnerved me, but what unnerved me still was the realisation that Goofy had never gotten anywhere with his travels. He had clearly taken the wrong turning somewhere or other, and having wandered too far down his precarious path, the film seemed content to leave him there. You see, the title of the short is actually a lie. The time frame is a little nebulous, but the bulk of the story appears to take place across a period of roughly 24 hours, not the promised two weeks. More crucially still, no vacation ever materialises. The effect of the short very much hinges on the discrepancy between what you're sold and what you're actually stuck with.

I later discovered that I had been deceived in quite another way. Unbeknownst to me as a child, the broadcast I had on tape had severely truncated the short, shaving off the entire last minute of the narrative (which I'm going to assume happened out of time constraints as opposed to anything within that final minute being considered objectionable). I never caught another TV broadcast of this short, so for years I was none the wiser. It wasn't until The Complete Goofy was released on DVD in the early 00s that I had the opportunity to see how it actually ended; it came as something of a revelation to discover that the scenario ran on for an additional 60 seconds, rounding things off on what felt like a more obvious punchline, but offering little additional closure in narrative terms. Still Goofy did not get his vacation. Not really. The title of the short remained as vexing as ever.

Directed by Jack Kinney, Two Weeks Vacation occurred toward the end of Goofy's initial run of theatrical outings, at the point where he had long abandoned his role as a comic foil to Mickey and/or Donald, and was living under the assumed identity of "George Geef", an everyman (everydog?) having to navigate his way through the trails and tribulation of mid-century suburbia (with those shorts touching on Geef's misadventures in parenting providing the basis for the character's redefining as a modern single father some four decades later, with the arrival of Goof Troop and its feature-length sequel A Goofy Movie). Two Weeks Vacation follows the familiar formula, the humor dependent on the contrast between the string of physical mishaps Goofy endures and the voice-over narration (here supplied by Alan Reed), which puts an incongruously buoyant spin on each and every calamity. It envisions Goofy (aka George, voice of Pinto Colvig) as an office worker, contributing fifty weeks per year to the capitalist grind in the beholden knowledge that he's been allocated two weeks in which to ditch the office walls and get back to nature. The central gag being that the vacation itself never gets underway, as Goofy gets bogged down with the insurmountable task of getting there; once he's traded in civilisation for the lure of the open road, he finds himself upon the fast-track to nowhere. There isn't a scrap of vacation to be had out there for the put upon everydog.

I'd dare suggest that Two Weeks Vacation would make ideal companion viewing to Steven Spielberg's Duel, in that it also deals with the perils of leaving the (relative) order of the urban world and venturing out into the vast unknown, which operates according to a vastly different set of rules. Naturally, the results are more comic in tone than in Spielberg's film; in place of a hulking great truck, Goofy finds a recurring nemesis in the form of a motorist with a camper trailer hitched to their vehicle, who seems entirely indifferent to everything going on around them and unleashes a deluge of unending inconsiderateness Goofy's way. The trailer becomes an omnipresent menace, its obstructive form effectively indistinct from the hands that keep it in motion (we see the driver, but never get as up close and personal with him as we do the great hindrance at his rear). Compared to Duel, where the truck, with its mostly invisible driver and their seeming lack of a motive for the all-out war they declare on Dennis Weaver's character, embodies the nature of the open landscape at its most frighteningly unknowable (at least to the city dweller who has wandered too far outside their comfort zone), the trailer's owners (it becomes apparent that, in addition the driver, there's actually a whole multitude of them hanging out within the trailer itself) potentially serve as a warped shadow to Goofy's own intentions. They are, presumably, fellow holiday-makers, their fault being that they are inclined to make themselves a little too at home in a land that they are merely passing through. It is unclear if their ill-mannered habits constitute an overspilling of the city's excesses, as the landscape is swallowed up by crass tourists for their own recreational use, or a reflection of the looser morals of the road. At any rate, we're given no reason to believe that the archetypes who regularly reside there are any more benevolent. The roadside is populated by types who range from the exploitative (the mechanic who fleeces Goofy for a new motor, before abandoning him to take a vacation of his own, although it is hard to say if this is done out of crookedness or incompetence) to the hostile (the eloquently-spoken drifter who curtly refuses Goofy's offer of a ride when his vehicle fails to meet his exacting standards) to the downright sinister (the unseen motel owner, who arguably makes the short as pertinent companion viewing to Psycho as it to Duel). Even nature itself appears to conspire against Goofy in one scene, a rain cloud parking itself directly above his vehicle so as to ensure that our hero can't enjoy even a little time basking in the sun while immobilised by a stop sign.

The interlude at the motel was always the segment of the short I found most fascinating, since it's here that Two Weeks Vacation veers closest toward the territory of horror and we get our clearest glimpse of the haunted underbelly of the ostensibly carefree road. As darkness sets in, Goofy faces a fresh challenge in locating a refuge for the night, and his status as an outside attempting to fit into an unwelcoming and treacherous domain becomes all the more pronounced. Goofy is now alone on an all-lit and abandoned road, where nary a sign of life is stirring, except for - at the most inopportune moment - his old nemesis the trailer owner. By sheer fluke, he ends up outside a motel, just slightly off the beaten track, with a vacant cabin, but soon discovers that it conceals an unpalatable secret...one that, in practice, amounts to little more than yet another mundane travel inconvenience, but that plays out as its own miniature nightmare. As Goofy attempts to settle, he discovers that the motel is situated right beside a railroad track - apparently at a turning, so that the train initially appears to be headed directly for him, before swerving and causing the cabin to vibrate so violently that Goofy is given no choice but to bail out. (Here, a small plot hole - Goofy had run out of gas before arriving at the motel, so it's never explained how he manages to get out.) There is something unsettling about this whole set-up - the inspired sight gag in which the cabin's picturesque front is revealed to be a fake, obscuring the more decrepit building right behind it, works on two levels, comically puncturing through the assumption of the roadside venue as a place of hospitality for the traveller, and having the distinct aura of a trap, of something more sinister stirring behind the romance. When Goofy arrives at the motel, nobody answers the door, with Goofy finding his own way into the cabin; the motel seems utterly deserted, the powers that operate it non-existent. The looming train that immediately shatters Goofy's prospects of a peaceful night's sleep is a nocturnal force that reveals itself only when the world is at its darkest and Goofy at his most isolated and vulnerable. Like the truck from Duel it is a raging beast stalking across its natural habitat, as seemingly devoid of human (or anthropomorphic canine) agency. Itself a mode of transport, the train represents an ostensible connection between two ports of call, yet once we've slipped into that ominous void in between there is an overwhelming sense of detachment from wherever we came from and wherever we thought we were going (at this point, Goofy's intended destination barely seems to matter any more, as his journey devolves into a case of navigating from one horror to the next). The train, much like everything else out here, is another force chugging aggressively onward, relentless in its opposition to us ever finding our way back out from the void.

As to whether Goofy ever finds his way back out from the void, I would say that he only marginally succeeds. Two Weeks Vacation does not resolve with the ending we'd be primed to expect, ie: a cyclic one, in which Goofy makes it back to the office with a newfound appreciation for the order and formality of the fifty working weeks ahead. Instead, much like Weaver's character from Duel, Goofy is left stranded in the hostile beyond, the restoration of the familiar never coming, although perhaps by the end he has (somewhat) made his peace with this. Following his stopover at the motel, Goofy gets in one last showdown with the trailer; its occupants are indulging in some kind of wild party, and nearly get Goofy killed in a manner reminiscent of one of the truck driver's tactics in Duel. When Goofy manages to overtake the trailer, he discovers that the driver has absconded (although how is not exactly clear, given that he was glimpsed in a preceding overhead shot), allowing the trailer to completely subsume his identity. Through another sheer accident, Goofy ends up taking a hold of the absent driver's wheel, giving him the chance to grapple physically with the omnipresent and exert some degree of personal control over the all-out chaos around him - at which point the law, whose presence seems immediately out of place in this domain, chooses to rear its head. For Goofy, this represents a victory of sorts - up until now, a lawlessness has pervaded the open road, and just to reconnect with law and order comes as a relief, even if he finds himself on the wrong side of it. Last seen in a police cell, Goofy becomes boxed in once more, and he accepts this as as close as he's ever going to get to a proper vacation. Enclosure is equated with security, and maybe that's substitute enough for the office building from whence we strayed. The message that the real refuge is to be found in containment is present after all.