The Untold Truth Of Willy Wonka

Author Roald Dahl had a whole chocolate river's worth of real-life inspiration for his 1964 children's classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. When Dahl was just a schoolboy himself, much like little Charlie Bucket and his band of fellow Golden Ticket-holders, he was invited to serve as a taste tester for Cadbury and got to try out their newest chocolate concoctions to offer feedback to the company. This set Dahl's imagination alight as to how exactly the company invented all these various new treats, and he later said he pictured the factory has having "an inventing room, a secret place where fully-grown men in white overalls spent all their time playing around with sticky boiling messes, sugar and chocs, and mixing them up to invent something new and fantastic." That description sounds a lot like the inventing room at Wonka's factory.

It wasn't just Dahl's own personal experiences that would inform his narrative, though. The idea for Slugworth, the Everlasting Gobstopper-thieving spy, was a reflection of the very real practice of espionage being waged between competing chocolatiers at the time, especially between Cadbury and Rowntree. That fear of deception and theft, of course, would inspire Wonka's own seclusion and reliance on the Oompa Loompas (who were originally called Whipple-Scrumpets in early drafts of Dahl's book) to guard his treasure trove of yummies.