His bulbous thumb jammed the pause button and the miniature needle slowly scraped against the disc. He asked if we needed to hear it again. The idling boombox, eager to continue on it's predestined rotation, made a whizzing noise in an oddly quiet classroom of two dozen teens.

"Do you understand the message? It's about the circle of life as it relates to parents and their children."

He'd lost me. At the second play I thought it was about a dad being a dick to his and by the third rotation (and pleading by my Religion & Ethics teacher to "really listen" to the words) I began to wonder if the song was really about a cat in a cradle. My mind wandered off to a vision of an adorable feline sleeping in a bed of warm-out of-the-dryer wool socks….

"It's about relationships people. Relationships."

Mr. McCartney? McCarty? His name is irrelevant to the story but every time the Harry Chapin song blares overhead in a discount store or during an incredibly awkward but telling lap dance I can't help but try and remember his name, his class and how he failed to understand that teens don't give a crap about relationships involving parents and children. They only care about relationship which improve social status or come with complimentary handies in a movie theater.

Almost 18 years, and my own kid later, I understand the song. I understand it's not an actual cat in a cradle, Rudy is more about the will to succeed and less about making a football team. These realizations have ruined just about everything I loved as a kid. You get older and you just don't see  things the same way anymore. Go back and reconsume all the books, movies and TV shows from your adolescence. They won't be the same.

This brings us to the reclusive chocolatier.

Willy Wonka was on TV again last week. It was my favorite movie as a kid but I've ruined it for my kid. He'll never want to watch it again, and my copy is buried under a weeks worth of dinners in the trash. The kid pisses his Huggies at the mere mention of Oompa Loompas. He's seen the original Willy Wonka for less than three minutes, because his dumb old man stopped ADD-flipping through channels and said "hey look Willy Wonka,", leaving the TV on during the boat ride scene that has taken millions of children on a virtual acid trip. I'm certain that a  riverboat excursion through Wonka's factory has either led to massive drug use or kept countless people from dropping acid. My kid, I'm pretty sure, is scarred for life. He wakes up in the middle of the night screaming "OOMPA LOOMPAS" and found the DVD in our entertainment cabinet and made me throw it in the trash. Wait, no, I had to punch it first and then toss it in the can. I was alone, so I watched it again.

Much like the relationships in 'Cats in the Cradle', or the "never give up" spirit of 'Rudy," the truth was in front of me the entire time.

Willy Wonka might have been a pedophile.

Willy Wonka Cast
Paramount Pictures
loading...

Let's break the story down and analyze the major plot points of the movie in order and work from this handy profile. The major profile points are in bold.

A pedophile is often times male, and over 30 years of age. 

Mmmmyup.

A pedophile is often vague about time gaps in employment which may indicate a loss in employment for questionable reasons or possible past incarceration.

Wonka, afraid workers were stealing his "secrets" shut the factory down and fired all of the employees and replaced them with a breed of small, children-like men called Oompa Loompas. No one has been in (or out) of the factory in decades.

A pedophile is most often single, and has very few friends in his age group.

He rescued this minimum wage workforce from a giant creature that was terrorizing them in their own habitat. Imagine the red tape to get thousands of illegal men overseas to work in a factory for no money -- just housing and a job.

Wonka hides for years until one day he decides to stuff his chocolate with magical Golden Tickets. Let's use this county for example -- visit a local mall on a Saturday afternoon and you're sure to come across at least 11 or 12 adults who brush their teeth with chocolate bars three times a day.  Somehow, only children find these tickets, which is amazing considering the obesity problem in the world. Odd coincidence or the clever planning of a perverted genius? The Golden Tickets are an admission to take a tour of the Chocolate Factory. To throw people off the scent, Wonka allows one guardian to accompany the child on the tour. Get in good with the parents. Get their guard down. Clever. But should we expect anything less from the man who stuck an entire three course meal in a stick of chewing gum?

He has hobbies that are child-like, such as collecting popular and expensive toys, keeping reptiles or exotic pets, or building plane and car models.

Forget tricking kids into a van with sweets -- this dude owns a factory full of Nerds on a Rope.

So he gets the kids on his home turf, and the first room he shows off is one where everything is edible. Not just edible -- lickable and suckable. This move was brilliant for two reasons -- get the kids fatten up and sluggish and to eliminate the portly kid right off the bat. Look, even pedophiles probably have types, and Wonka probably wasn't big on the pudgers so he just let Augusta stick a sippy straw into his chocolate river. An accidental topple into the rushing waves and Augustus is sucked into the pipes.

Gone almost as quickly is the little snot who doesn't throw out chewing gum. Who chews gum until all of the flavor is gone? That's a sick little kid right there. The minute gum loses it's flavor it's similar to the plastic end of a shoelace. This kid sticks it behind her ears for safe keeping. Next, the greedy kid Veruca takes the dumpster dive out of the competition, most likely because she'd definitely be the one to blow the whistle on the Wonker. She'd rat him out, the old man would get the best lawyer in all of Wonkaville (where do they live?) and not only is Wonka working the kitchen at the county pen but all the Oompas are deported back to their country and the factory becomes a division of the Cadbury Corporation. Gone. All gone. Even the lickable wall of snoozberries. The Oompas love the snozzberry wall because they know it's the same nickname Willy uses for his balls.

This leaves us with two young boys  -- Mike Teevee and Charlie Bucket. Mike loves TV; he watches it constantly and has probably seen more than his fair share of TV reports about grown men doing inappropriate things to young boys and has "very special episodes" of every sitcom on reel-to-reel. Mike is too risky. This leaves Charlie, the broke child who lives in a home with all his grandparents living in the same bed, and a father barely skilled enough to keep his gig screwing toothpaste tops on tubes and a mother who works all day. The kid has nothing.

The pedophile often seeks out shy, handicapped, and withdrawn children, or those who come from troubled homes or under privileged homes. He then showers them with attention, gifts, taunting them with trips to desirable places like amusement parks, zoo's, concerts, the beach and other such places.

"Charlie come here. I want to show you my snozzberries."

Chris Illuminati is the editor-in-chief of GuySpeed. He’s written three humor books, ruined many personal relationships and still cries during thunderstorms. His “Half a Man” column appears every Tuesday. You can read more of his work here or follow him on Twitter.

 

More From GuySpeed