The story of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory did not end where the movies starring Gene Wilder in 1971 and Johnny Depp in 2005 indicated. The success of the first film pushed Roald Dahl to try to capitalize even more on that fever with a second and third part that would explain what happened after the end of the first book. However, the failure of a story even more surreal than the first caused it to remain unfinished.
In 1972 Roald Dahl published a sequel called Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. And although the first part has garnered several adaptations, including movies, video games, and animated series, Hollywood has never dared to bring its sequel to the screen. Although in 2019 there was some interest from Netflix, nothing else has been heard about the project. But even when they wanted to keep the saga alive with something more than another adaptation, they opted for an original story like Wonka with Timothée Chalamet instead of trying to do justice to Dahl’s work. Knowing it, it’s easy to understand why.
Charlie and Wonka go to space
The plot of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator places us right after the boy has won the chocolate factory. Riding in the factory’s peculiar magical vehicle, the elevator malfunctions and shoots up into the sky at such speed that it accidentally ends up lost in Earth’s orbit.
Fortunately, they stay near the USA space hotel, believed to be empty, and use it to park the elevator. With the United States seeing this action as a threat, Wonka starts singing unintelligibly to make them believe they are aliens, but they end up discovering that there are actually aliens among them and that, in fact, they have taken over the hotel.
After managing to escape them in the elevator, they decide to travel back to Earth to help the astronauts and hotel personnel who had traveled there and are now being devoured by the aliens. Taking advantage of the elevator being alien-proof (typical Wonka stuff), they try to tow the ship with the remaining survivors, but the aliens chain themselves and attach to the vehicles.
Fortunately, Wonka and Charlie manage to activate the elevator’s thrusters which, along with Earth’s gravity, end up burning the aliens, thus ending the threat and returning safely to the chocolate factory. A crazy story, right? Well, it doesn’t even end there.
Charlie and the journey to the quantum world
Upon returning to the factory, it’s time to get to work, but Charlie’s grandparents claim to be too old for that and prefer to stay in bed. To make them change their minds, Wonka offers them some rejuvenating pills called Vita-Wonka. With them, they will be able to rejuvenate 20 years.
Unfortunately, the grandparents get too excited about Wonka’s particular candy and suffer an overdose, turning into babies. The worst outcome befalls one of the grandmothers, who ends up eating more than necessary and ends up at -2 years, disappearing from that reality and jumping to a place called Lesslandia where those with negative years end up.
Concerned about the aggressiveness of giant mosquitoes inhabiting that plane of reality, Charlie and Wonka decide to take the elevator to travel there and save the grandmother, administering her several doses of Wonka-Vita to make her gain years and return home. As expected, things also go awry and they end up returning her to the world of the living with 358 years.
After managing to calculate the age, Wonka and the family return all the grandparents to their normal age and immediately return to bed. The only thing that makes them get out of bed is a letter from the President of the United States inviting them to the White House to thank them for their work as space heroes. To avoid another disaster, they decide to go there in the helicopter sent by the government.
A failure that tastes like success
Just as with the original story of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, inspired by Dahl’s childhood at a private school and how the company Cadbury sent candy samples to the prestigious school for the children living there to approve their inventions, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator also utilized real events to tell its story.
Charlie y el gran ascensor de cristal (Colección Alfaguara Clásicos)
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Just as the children in the factory represented some deadly sins and reflected the society of the time, although it underwent several changes in future editions to avoid criticisms such as child abuse or racism -in fact, the Oompa Loompas were pygmy slaves-, that story of space elevators and political plots was based on current events.
Roald Dahl transformed the tension of the space race and the Cold War between the United States and the USSR into a children’s tale in which Americans fought against aliens who wanted to destroy civilization to bring them to their planet. But at a time when the good guys were no longer considered so good, and the bad guys not so bad, that twist was seen as inappropriate for a children’s story.
Receiving much less success than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the audience was left waiting for more stories about the mysterious place and its peculiar candies, preventing Dahl from continuing the story to reach the ending he had in mind. However, what could be considered a failure ended up being a success because that failure led him to write some of his best books, including gems like The Witches and Matilda that ended up being more famous and recognized than that surreal sequel.
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