MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: Roald Dahl hid a dirty joke in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a beloved children's film and one of the things that people definitely love about it is how edgy the whole thing is. The lovable Charlie, who is one of a group of children to win a tour of the mysterious Chocolate Factory of the eccentric candymaker, Willy Wonka, sees the other (ruder) children have terrible thing after terrible thing happen to them as the tour progresses. It's not, like, a horror film, but it's not exactly for the faint of heart, either. However, besides the somewhat dark edges to the story, there is also a legend that the film has a sequence that is meant to hide a clever X-rated joke.
At one point in the film, Wonka introduces them to a room that is filled with lickable wallpaper (designed for nurseries), where the fruit on the wallpaper can be licked and it will taste just like the fruit that you see.
Well, one of the fruits mentioned are snozzberries. As the legend goes, snozzberries are supposed to be, in effect, male genitalia. So the kids are licking male genitalia. Gross.
Roald Dahl (who adapted his own novel for the film, although screenwriter David Seltzer did an uncredited rewrite of Dahl's script. The whole film, by the way, was paid for by a candy company as a giant ad, of sorts, as I noted in a Movie Legends Revealed a number of years ago) was famously a mischievous sort, so this is not exactly a stunning thing for him if it were true, but IS it true?
I say no.
First off, there's already something to be said for the notion that authorial intent is fairly meaningless if it is conflict with the work itself. For instance, let's say that J.K. Rowling wanted to say, in 2021, that, I dunno, Ron Weasley had vampire fangs in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Would it suddenly mean that Ron Weasley did, in fact, have vampire fangs in that book? I don't think so, since he clearly DIDN'T in the book itself.
Similarly, if Roald Dahl were to define terms that were used in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in a different way years later, does it necessarily mean that those terms apply to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? I think the answer to that is no. If a term was defined one way in 1971 and a different way in 1979, the 1971 usage would remain the same either way.
This all matters, of course, because of Roald Dahl's 1979 novel (meant for an adult audience) called My Uncle Oswald (15 years after Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was released and 8 years after the film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, was released), where a woman described how she used condoms to secretly collect sperm from guys:
“How did you manage to roll the old rubbery thing on him?”
“There’s only one way when they get violent,” Yasmin said. “I grabbed hold of his snozzberry and hung onto it like grim death and gave it a twist or two to make him hold still.”
“Ow.”
“Very effective.”
“I’ll bet it is.”
“You can lead them around anywhere you want like that.”
“I’m sure.”
“It’s like putting a twitch on a horse.”
This is the inspiration for the legend that Dahl meant for snozzberries to stand in for male genitalia. However, I don't think that even really passes even a simple face value reading of the text. For instance, if a character was to describe grabbing the private parts of a guy and said, "I grabbed him by his banana," we would not then think that a character later saying that she was going to have a banana split for dessert meant that she was using the word the same in both usages, right? So I don't think there's any indication that snozzberries MEAN male genitalia, but rather, that it is a word that you could also use to describe male genitalia.
And, as noted earlier, the fact remains that My Uncle Oswald was not written until YEARS after Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, so how in the world could its usage in a 1979 book affect how the word was meant in 1971?
In the original 1964 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory novel, Dahl describes the lickable wallpaper scene like this, noting that the wallpaper “has pictures of fruits on it – bananas, apples, oranges, grapes, pineapples, strawberries, and snozzberries…”
Dahl had previously used snozzberries in his earlier work as a fictional fruit that the gremlins (the mythical beings that Dahl had written about years earlier, during World War II, in his very first novel, which was also intended to become a Walt Disney film that never materialized) ate and it was described in his gremlins stories as a "sweet, juicy, red fruit."
Also, note how Wonka responds when Veruca Salt asks, "Snozzberries? Who ever heard of a snozzberry?". He snaps, "We are the music makers… and we are the dreamers of dreams." It sure seems like he is speaking to the fictional nature of the fruit and surely not that the fruit was meant to be a penis. I don't think that there is anything substantial, really, to support the notion that the Wonka scene was meant to be anything other than how it was presented in the actual film.
I'm going with the legend as...
STATUS: False
Thanks to Melissa at Today I Found Out, who came to the same conclusion regarding snozzberries' meaning.
Be sure to check out my archive of Movie Legends Revealed for more urban legends about the world of film.
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