Wonka

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a music box winding, slightly out of tune)
Here's a thing about that film you might not know.

[Verse 1]
There is a novel, and the novel is about a boy,
and the boy's name is Charlie, and the book is called that too,
and when they made the film they took the boy's name off the poster
and they put the chocolate man's name up there instead.
Why? Because a candy company was paying for the picture.
The film exists to launch a chocolate bar. That's why it's called that.

[Chorus]
Wonka! Wonka! The movie is the wrapper!
The whole two hours of it is the label on a bar!
They financed it to sell it and they named it what they'd sell,
and it turned into a classic, which nobody could have planned.
Wonka. Wonka. The advertisement won.
It got so good it stopped being an advertisement.

[Verse 2]
And the bar itself — the actual bar — did not work.
The first formula failed, the thing wouldn't hold together,
it melted or it crumbled or it came apart in transit,
so the candy that the film was made to sell was not there
when the film came out. The film came out alone.
And it was strange and cold and frightening and children loved it anyway.

[Chorus]

[Verse 3]
And the man they cast to play him was a stage actor from New York
who played the whole thing cold — no twinkle, no warmth, no wink,
because he understood the part was not a kindly chocolate man,
it was a test, and tests are not kind, and he refused to soften it.
He asked to enter limping and then somersault, so that
no one watching him would ever know when he was telling the truth.

[Bridge]
Now the character is fiction of the purest kind —
a man who does not exist, in a factory that cannot,
who tests children morally and disposes of the failures,
and he sells more chocolate now than any actual chocolatier.
Fiction escaped the book, escaped the film, escaped the wrapper,
and set up in the real world, and started charging money.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the music box runs down and stops)
It was an advertisement.
It became the thing it was advertising.