To Sing With Heart and Voice, God Save the Queen: Willy Wonka's tickets spread throughout the entire world and yet still got found only by white people.
I assume that the candy bars were only sold in western countries. Thus European and American children found them. Considering the context of the time it would have been more likely for white children for two obvious reasons. One, most of the children are rich kids and could buy many more candy bars than negro children in America who would have been not only not as numerous at the time but for the most part poorer. Two, even if they sold the candy bar in Africa and a child found a golden ticket, who would pay for his plane ticket?
Do you actually believe that there wouldn’t have been anyone in any of Africa’s many nations capable of paying for a plane ticket? Where did you learn this complete garbage?
Oh yes, just to keep up with race quotas so that “People of color” can be “represented in popular fiction” the writers should have crafted some wild and ridiculous story about an African that won despite living in poverty and managing to get a plane ticket. Or would he just be a military general or politicians son, that wouldn’t be working class enough for your tastes though. If people of color want to be represented as they see fit in popular fiction then why don’t they write their own fiction? You say that white people have no opinion on the race issue and yet you somehow want us to depict people of color in fiction accurately as if we know what they’re life is like.
Because a wild and ridiculous story would have been so out of place in a Roald Dahl story. Yes, somebody importing crates of chocolate bars or going on an international shopping spree (or bars that are sold all over the world being sold all over the world) would be ridiculous and improbable compared to a man who grew rich as a businessman just shutting down his factory lines and having his workers open candy bars he bought en masse to be thrown away, just to find a ticket.
This is a story where a girl gets blown up into a giant berry and then is cured by juicing. This is a story where a boy gets miniaturized through television broadcast and is then stretched out like taffy to be the right size again.
This is a ridiculous and improbable story about the ridiculous and improbable. It has a glass elevator that is spaceworthy and is powered by “skyhooks”. It has chocolate mixed unprotected in the open air in the form of a giant river. It presents the manufacture of candy to children as if it were a magical enterprise fueled by whimsy and pure imagination, rather than an exercise in industrial cooking.
(Though just by accident, it almost got the connection between chocolate and modern-day slavery right.)
But no, we must keep it grounded in “realism”, which in your mind means whatever ridiculous and improbable contortions of reality are necessary to keep things as white as you imagine “the western world” to be.
You’re the one who is imposing a quota here - all of the whimsy and wonder for white children.
Ok. But CHARLIE was poor as SHIT.
And just by happen stance kept finding the little bits of money to buy chocolate bars, which one just so happen to have the ticket and fake Slugworth just so happened to be there when every person found tickets….. Second there have always been people in the CONTINENT of Africa who could buy and sale your weight in gold. Am I the ONLY PERSON who caught that he said Negro? Also they can make up and transport an entire race of people but its so hard to conceive black people have the money to travel? Your train of thought is adolescent and insulting .
Exactly. The story was built on happenstance and absurdity. When Charlie Bucket through sheer chance finds a golden ticket, it’s a reward he’s earned because he’s a member of the virtuous and deserving poor. But the idea that a Black person in the UK or US could have done the same thing and been equally deserving is apparently ridiculous, and the idea that it would have happened in Africa by a rich or poor person somehow provokes scorn.
And also it’s worth noting, Dahl “made up a whole race of people” only in the second edition of the book. Before that the Oompa-Loompas were identifiably African “pygmies” who were happy to spend their lives toiling and serving as guinea pigs in deadly experiments for the benefit of white children in exchange for chocolate and protection from jungle predators. But you could tell they were happy, because they sang while they worked.
(In case anyone argues that the name “Oompa-Loompa” seems to introduce doubt that they were meant to be anything other than a fantasy race, I’ll suggest they go look up the sorts of names that European invaders gave to African peoples, and why.)
Also, let’s not forget, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published in 1964, not the 1910s or the 1800s. In many ways it was a deliberate throwback or homage to the older literature that Dahl had read growing up, but it was actually published in the second half of the 20th century. It wasn’t written in the spirit of the times (which wouldn’t change the problematic nature), it was written in the spirit of earlier times that were being romanticized.
(Source: crackerhell)
