brobible.com/culture: The “Willy Wonka Experience” that unfolded in Glasgow, Scotland has taken the internet by storm given the sheer absurdity of it all.
Not only did the organizers use AI art to advertise the event, but the event itself was hosted in a dingy warehouse and featured nothing but “plastic props, a small bouncy castle, and some backdrops pinned against the walls.”
4 comments:
I cannot begin to explain to you how hard I laughed reading this article. The first thing that caught me off guard was the title. Oompa Loompa Speaks Out is a wild title for an article. It reminds me of the recent internet trend where someone did a parody of an Oompa Loompa criticizing Willy Wonka: “oh that's not,” “in the sense that.” The second thing that got me was the photo of the woman where it looks like she is in a meth lab. Then the next thing where the kids were given a singular jelly bean. You're kidding, I literally can't stop laughing. I don't think people realize how much money goes into immersive experiences but I think this utter failure of an immersive experience really helped people appreciate actually good experiences. The AI script really goes to show how sometimes words are not good for an experience and sometimes, the best example I can think of is a haunted house, things don't need words they just need a better atmosphere.
I have seen this Willy Wonka story show up in a couple of places, and I think it is an important story to take note of. While I don’t have any inside knowledge to back up this claim, I feel like what probably happened here was a person or organization had great ideas for a project they wanted to work on but did not have the resources, in either money or talent, to actually pull it off. While this is not necessarily a problem, there is a problem when you let this mess of a show actually get performed and not shut it down once you can tell it is going to be a disaster.
Directors and artistic teams often have grand visions for performances, and it can be hard to tell if an idea is going to come together until rehearsals or potentially even technical rehearsals. By that point in the process, large amounts of money will have already been spent, and a combination of the sunk cost fallacy and the idea that the show must go on will force a performance to be seen in front of audiences, even if nobody working on it actually wants to or thinks it is ready.
I was really intrigued by this article because I had not heard of any drama surrounding the new Willy Wonka. This movie sounded really weird and unsettling to me so I did not go to see it in the movie theaters. I had not heard of the Willy Wonka experience in Scotland. I wonder what company or organization put on this experience and what it was really supposed to be like. I feel really bad for the actors who participated in this show. From the statement by Kritsy Patterson, it sounds like this was a really poor experience for everyone who was in the show and all the kids and families who went to see it. Something that stuck out to me was when Patterson said that the money was too much for them to not take the job. Since acting is more of a pay check to pay check type of job, it must be hard to go through these moral dilemmas of which roles to take.
Reading this article was absolutely HILARIOUS. Especially when I read that tweet stating the following: “The Oompa Loompa from the knock off Wonkaland experience looks like she’s running a literal meth lab and is seriously questioning [her] life choices up until this point.” I think the funniest part is that we’re talking about something / a person or character that was in a movie which was a part of my childhood and other people's childhood too. I'd have never thought that I would hear “oompa loompa” and “meth lab” in the same sentence. I did end up seeing the new Willy Wonka in theaters and I surprisingly liked it a LOT more than I thought I would. I absolutely hated Johnny Depp’s version of Wonka (even though that was “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”). And the Depp version was the first version I watched, so it left a bitter taste in my mouth in regards to the franchise. Also oompa loompas always freaked me out. They are terrifying.
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