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Comment by grovulent | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if younger folk today watch that and think how quaint, old and dated it seems... or if they see it and wonder if their current modern cinema fair is really missing something these strange films had.

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It's a great sadness to me that many children have grown, and will grow, up with the perception that the vastly inferior Tim Burton remake is the definitive version. The film starring Wilder should be included on future releases of the former as a public service.

I'll save you of this sadness with the assurance that absolutely nobody, young or old, thinks of Tim Burton's remake as the definitive version.

We love it but TBH with a young 'un we skip to the GW scene described and I try to skip the boat ride. Seriously, beheading a chicken in a children's film is a dark dark choice...

The world has darkness, and seeing some of it helps a child understand the world they live in.

Yeah - the trade off between this lesson and being woken up late at night because nightmares...

Never had nightmares from this. Now, Tremors and Terminator were another story :)

Still, I've had way more nightmares rooted in real life situations than anything else. When I was 3-4 we had a bulldozer and steam shovel out to replace our septic tank. For YEARS, maybe even into early adulthood, but with less and less frequency I had the dream where the bulldozer was chasing me to the deck and it felt like I was running through quicksand.

I never understood this. The Tim Burton version of the film isn't a remake of this one. It's a direct adaptation of the book and is vastly more faithful to the source material than the GW version of the movie. Why people continue to compare them as if they're the same thing is weird to me. I enjoyed both almost equally but for entirely different reasons. Why others can't is beyond me...

How is it more faithful to the book?

I also really like both of the films but I don't see how either is more or less faithful to the book.

It shares the same name, and some scenes are more faithful - like the squirrel room, which became a room full of geese in the original film.

But in the Burton film, ultimately, it's a story about Wonka reconnecting with his estranged father, explaining all of his weirdness and childlike behaviour as being somehow related to this event. Charlie is a second runner in that respect from the moment Wonka enters the screen.

My other issue is that Depp is insufferable, irritating and took the "child-like" description to an extreme. I dislike the Burton version more than I dislike the Hitchhikers film... which is to say, a lot. Both took a well trodden and loved story and changed it in a way that seems to add nothing to the narrative. The Hitchhikers film[1] fell back on the "but Douglas Adams never told the story the same twice in any medium" as an excuse. I don't believe Burton had that one to fall back on. Especially as Dahl felt Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory didn't capture his vision for the movie[2].

[1] http://www.therobotsvoice.com/2011/05/the_15_worst_things_ab... [2] https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/why-roald-dahl-hated-willy-wonka...

Regarding your footnote [1], it wasn't entirely an excuse. Most of the new things people hated in the movie were from Douglas Adams himself (he did almost all of the film's many, many drafts), because he never could tell the story the same way twice. You can almost tell there was a telephone effect in Douglas Adams writing, revising, rewriting his own drafts so many times for the whims of Hollywood executives. The interesting bit of final irony being that when Douglas Adams passed Hollywood passed it off to British directors that didn't meddle much further with the final draft beyond what happens naturally when you cast it and storyboard it.

I grew up squarely in between the two, and I can assure you that the book is the definitive version.

No one will ever think that

I wonder if younger folk today listen to Gregorian chant and think how quaint, old and dated it seems... or if they see it and wonder if their current modern music is really missing something these strange sounds had.

- Somebody ca. 1050 AD

If you'll attend mass at a Gregorian monastery with the right acoustics, you'll wonder too. Recordings don't do it justice.

Klosterman's guesses about how rock will be perceived in 500 years might interest you. It's in his latest, "But What if We're Wrong?"

He's one of the best writers on pop culture, and tends to dive into the sort of arguments that would be home in a kitchen at a house party that's winding down. I don't say that to diminish them, they're incredibly fun.

https://www.amazon.com/But-What-If-Were-Wrong/dp/0399184120

> I wonder if younger folk today watch that and think how quaint, old and dated it seems...

As the caretaker of a pair of younger folk (twins, age 7), I can share that they find it very slow compared to today's children's movies.

There will be a number of younger folks who won't be able to relate to the humanity in older films, much as many younger folks aren't able to relate to melodically complex music. Some of them will get older, then change, however.

(p.s. fare)

One thing I do to young people is show them things like "The Music Man" so they can't say they've never been exposed. They usually like it.

Sorry, I don't understand... Is it your understanding that music is getting less melodically complex?

On the whole, no. However, there are recent genres that concentrate on things other than melody, with fan bases that aren't used to following involved melodies.

Compare a modern popular track to an almost arbitrary Baroque piece, and you'll easily come to this conclusion.

OTOH compare a modern popular track to a modern jazz track, or certain complicated rock tracks (see Dream Theater for example), and you'll likely conclude that it's popularity of simple things, not simplicity of modern things, at work.

(Edited: spelling.)

> I wonder if younger folk today watch that and think how quaint, old and dated it seems..

I think many young people today would be horrified at how 'ableist' it was for him to use that gag.

How is it ableist?

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