Friday, Feb. 11, 2011

Oompa-Loompas

Amazingly, the orange-faced, green-haired Oompa-Loompas are not nearly the most insanely psychedelic things about 1971's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. (That would have to be the boat-ride scene.) Gene Wilder's unhinged title character claims to have discovered them in Loompaland, a place of "nothing but desolate wastes and fierce beasts." Describing them as so small and helpless that "a Wangdoodle would eat 10 of them for breakfast and think nothing of it," Wonka decamps the entire population to his candy factory. There, Wonka and the Oompa-Loompas fall into a master-slave relationship, as the little creatures operate at Wonka's beck and call (he summons them with a pennywhistle) and sing rhyming songs about how stupid children are. One imagines they do this often in order to briefly forget the fact that they operate at the whim of a madman.