web-goddess

Category: Roald Dahl

  • Wonka Thoughts

    Since Kevin asked, I just checked out the new Charlie the Chocolate Factory TV spot. Hmm. Okay, first the positives: They put back the squirrels! I’m really, really happy about that. I always thought the “geese-laying-golden-eggs” was stupid. And though the boat looked weird to me at first, the shot of it from above with all the Oompa-Loompas at the oars really reminded me of the original Joseph Schindelman illlustration. The bad: As Kevin said, Johnny Depp really does seem to be trying to channel a 13-year-old boy here. I don’t think that’s a good thing. We already had Gene Wilder as the literary-quote-spouting Wonka, and now we’ve got Depp as the let’s-boogie Wonka… neither of which seem very faithful to the book. I’m withholding final judgement til I can see the whole film together.

  • RDF Contest Winners

    I finally got around to selecting the winning entries in my Roald Dahl Sequel Contest. You should go read them; they’re pretty funny. I especially like the bit in the second one where an Iraqi uses George’s Marvelous Medicine to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

  • BBC link posted!

    I just noticed that my Dahl site has finally appeared on the Website of the Day page for BBC Radio Suffolk. I’m guessing that means the interview aired yesterday. I hope they remember to send me a tape of it!

  • Big Read

    Big Read – the 100 best beloved books in Britain. Roald Dahl is on this list four times! The only authors with as many mentions are Dickens (tops with five), Pratchett, Rowling, and Jacqueline Wilson. (I’ve never heard of her; have any of you read any of her stuff?) By my count I’ve read 38 of these. I have a perverse desire to go through in alphabetical order and cross them all off. It’d probably take years. Anybody want to join me?

  • RDF

    I posted another interview with Roald Dahl over at my Dahl site. He just cracks me up. I mean, he out and out lies! He’s still claiming he got “shot down” over Libya during World War II, when in fact he ran out of gas and crash landed. He also pontificates on why he “never” wrote a novel, when in reality he tried one early in his career and it was a colossal flop. What a crotchety old egocentric man. (I did like the part where he ripped on the craptacular Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.)

  • Literary issues…

    I finally managed to track down the text to a very elusive and rare Roald Dahl short story entitled “In the Ruins”. I am absurdly proud of this. I like being an expert at something. Granted, it’s not in a very lucrative field, but I take some pride in the notion that (other than his relatives and biographers), I probably know more about Roald Dahl than anybody else on the planet. Isn’t that nuts? The thing is, it’s gotten to the point where I don’t actually enjoy his books anymore. He’s an academic challenge for me. I started the site as an exercise to learn HTML and produce some content, but somehow along the way it turned into something else. It’s like a job now. I do it because nobody else does and I think somebody ought to. There’s an odd feeling of possessiveness involved. Dahl is mine.

    Which reminds me, I recently read A.S. Byatt’s Possession, which (among other things) is about the “cult of the author” and the way fans/critics/scholars deconstruct and construct writers’ lives. I identified with a lot of it. There’s quite a thrill associated with discovering something the “average” fan doesn’t know. I surf eBay and I have to restrain myself from the impulse to buy every crap piece of Dahl-iana that’s on offer. I don’t need the stuff, but the urge to possess everything is powerful. I found the character of Mortimer Cropper distasteful yet sympathetic. There but for the grace of God (and lack of a lot of money) go I.

    To bring it back to “In the Ruins”, this story has only been reprinted a few times. It’s obviously not one that Dahl or his family felt would contribute to his legacy. So should I have bothered tracking it down? Do literary scholars have any responsibility to respect their (dead) subjects’ privacy? Is it wrong to make museum pieces out of someone’s personal items? I’m rambling. I think about these things though.

    (Oh, and if you decide to read the story, be forewarned that it’s pretty gruesome. Best not read it right after lunch.)

  • Banned Books Week

    I’ve been doing tons of work over at my Dahl site lately. Check it out if you’re bored. And don’t forget, it’s Banned Books Week! Celebrate your freedom to read. (I still can’t get over the fact that some school tried to ban The Lorax because it “criminalizes the forestry industry”.)

  • Children’s UX

    Jakob Nielsen has a new report on website usability for kids. Since I myself run a site geared towards children, I read it with some interest. Unfortunately it confirmed my worst fears. Kids want bells and whistles. Kids don’t like to read. Kids don’t get hierarchical navigation. All of which means my site is one big usability nightmare for them. Honestly, though, I sorta knew that would be the case when I designed it. I had to think about the adults that would visit the site too, though. I also wanted to make it clear that my site was about information, not pure entertainment. I mean, compare my site to the official one. That’s the debate right there. The official one is very flashy and whizzy and noisy, yet it’s also incredibly difficult to track down specific information about Dahl or his books. My site, on the other hand, is pretty much transparent about where everything is located. Which is better? Personally, I think challenging kids is more important than pandering to them. I’m not talking about making things deliberately difficult, but I’m not talking about making them totally simple either. Kids are gonna need to learn how to research someday. Why should I hand them everything on a silver platter? I want them to think and read and figure things out. I refuse to dumb down my site because little Johnny’s too impatient to click on the “Timeline” to find out Dahl’s birthday. This is where I think the flaw is in Nielsen’s study. Was he studying kids using websites for fun, or kids using websites for a purpose? Which type of site do you prefer?

    I think I might make a survey at my site to find out what the visitors think. Not that that will make me change anything, but I might as well know if I’m pissing them off.

  • Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory – 30th Anniversary

    I finally picked up a copy of the Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory – 30th Anniversary DVD the other day. You know, I have really mixed feelings about this film. On one hand I have the same cheesy feelings of nostalgia and love for it that all Generation Xers have. On the other hand, as a Roald Dahl expert I find it to be a cheap, shoddy, craptacular adaptation of the book. So I had a lot of conflicting emotions while watching the “cast commentary” version today. My thoughts:

    • While it was great to have all five of the kids there, I wish they had actually shown them grown-up at the start (a la the terrific Goonies DVD commentary). Instead you just get voice introductions, and it’s a little hard at first to remember who’s who.
    • Just as in the film, Charlie and Augustus don’t say a lot. Mike, Veruca, and Violet dominate the discussion. I guess that’s not surprising, considering those three stayed in the acting profession while the other two quit and faded from public view.
    • Veruca and Violet were both hot for Charlie in a big way. Apparently Veruca won and Violet ended up with some random other blond extra kid. Violet is still bitter about this, and the two of them spent most of the commentary laughing about it. They kept trying to get Charlie to comment, but he seemed embarrassed and wouldn’t say anything.
    • You could totally hear them trying to pull Augustus into the conversation and failing. He’s only in the movie for about fifteen minutes anyway, so once he’d gone up the pipe he was pretty much silent. They finally just resorted to asking him for German pronunciations and landmark identification every so often.
    • Damn. I’ve corresponded with both Mike and Violet (via my Dahl site), so I was totally hoping for a shout-out. Denied.
    • The only mention of Dahl’s name occurred when Mike referred to one of the schoolteacher’s speeches as “So Roald Dahl.” Which was utter crap, since that bit didn’t come from the original book and didn’t sound anything like typical Dahl.
    • Dahl only makes a few appearances in the extra documentary and featurette, as well. The director never explains why he decided to throw out all of the Oompa-Loompas original songs in favor of the dreadful Bricusse/Newley ones. He also mentions but never fully explains why Dahl’s original script was torn to shit and rewritten by someone else. He does, however, tell the thrilling tale of how the entire film was conceived and produced merely to sell a new Quaker Oats candy bar (that ended up flopping completely). Well, at least no one will be in any danger of presuming the producers’ intentions to be artistic.

    See what I mean? I start out with nice feelings towards the film, but that quickly fades when I realize how great it could have been and how crappy and commercial it turned out. I feel sad that my generation venerates such a shallow marketing ploy as a cinematic classic. Mostly I feel for Roald Dahl, who hated the end result and resented having his name put to it. Sure, he wasn’t the greatest writer in the world, but at least he wasn’t responsible for “Oompa loompa doompety doo.”

  • A Rant About the Sorry State of Teenagers Today

    Okay, so I’m running this contest over at my Dahl site, right? I received about forty entries all together and now I’m trying to decide who wins. I’ve got lots of nice entries from adults, and several good ones from little kids as well. But the writing in the teen age group is just unbelievably bad. I’m not talking about splitting infinitives or misusing participles or anything tricky either. I’m talking about basic spelling, grammar, and punctuation. You know, the stuff most people learn by the sixth grade. These “essays” were almost unreadable. I’ve never seen such run-on sentences in my life. Random words would be capitalized for no apparent reason. One kid actually wrote the word “copetishion” (as in, “competition”). My jaw hit the floor when I saw that one. The nine-year-olds’ entries were so much better! I can’t figure it out. Snookums feels that – as a former County Spelling Bee champion – I’m being prejudiced against people who have difficulty with language and spelling, but I honestly don’t feel like I’m being overly pedantic. This is basic stuff. They’re not dyslexic; they’re just sloppy. Is it that the younger kids are still at an age where teachers care about such things and therefore enforce them? Is it that teenagers just don’t care? Is it that younger kids visiting my site are probably there because they’re precocious readers (and therefore a good writers), and that most teenagers visiting will probably be looking for a book report to scam off the Internet? Or is this just the way it works, and the smart nine-year-olds of today will eventually mutate into the surly illiterate fourteen-year-olds of tomorrow? I hate to sound so cynical, but you wouldn’t believe these e-mails. Are these sub-literates representative of high schoolers today, Max? I sure as hell hope not.