Aaron Tracy

Dahl was never shy about telling people how much he hated the film.

It wasn't just the title or the focus or Gene Wilder's performance.

He also hated the music, which he described as saccharine, sappy, and sentimental.

Here he is on Desert Island Discs in 1979 talking more about it.

I want to bring in another voice now, a critic who's written extensively on the Dahl adaptations, including a piece I loved on Wonka.

He's someone whose childhood was really shaped by the author.

My name is Manuel Bettencourt and I'm the author of Hello Stranger and The Male Gaze.

I grew up in Colombia, but I went to a British private school in Bogota.

And so all of our curriculum, especially for English, was very British focused.

And so Dahl was my gateway drug to literature in general.

So I was reading George's Marvelous Medicine and James the Giant Peach, eventually something like The Witches and Matilda before I was like 12.

And I was reading in my second language.

It's one of those writers that I owe my own career as a writer and as a critic, because even then, there's no way to read Dahl without understanding how a sentence is structured, how language helps shape a character, how an adjective can suddenly turn a phrase.

It hadn't dawned on me until I was starting to pull everything from that piece how much of my childhood had been shaped by him in ways that I hadn't even remembered.

I asked Manuel to talk a little bit more about Roald Dahl's specific feelings about the Gene Wilder film.

I think it is the one that everyone knows the best, and it's probably the one that he disliked the most.

And so it exists at this weird intersection where if he had had his way, that is not the fellow we would have gotten.

There's a reason why there was never another Charlie and the Chocolate Factory adaptation that happened in his lifetime, because that is how much he hated the Gene Wilder

version, the way that it focused on Wonka rather than Charlie.

I think the reasons why he disliked it or he voiced his dislike is also one of the reasons that made it such a classic.