Aaron Tracy

I'll let him introduce himself.

I'm David Bean Cooley.

I'm the TV critic for Fresh Air with Terry Gross on NPR.

I'm also a professor of television studies at Rowan University, and I'm a lifelong TV critic.

I asked David what he thought about the most famous and most beloved of the doll adaptations.

Mel Stewart, who directed the original Willy Wonka movie, gets it so right in terms of tone that my kids watching it growing up, they're in their 40s now.

They still quote from it.

There are still so many lines that hit them very long.

And they're from the book.

They were also in the Johnny Depp movie directed by Tim Burton.

They landed better in the original, I think.

A movie that Dahl really didn't like and sort of disowned.

Oh, see, I don't even know that.

Yeah, he wrote the screenplay.

Yeah, but I didn't know he disowned it.

What was his dissatisfaction?

My guess is a big part of it was just the shift in focus.

You know, he wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the studio made Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

And it's just that was not his intention.

I think he had issues with Gene Wilder's performance.