A Willy Wonka experience in Glasgow has turned into an utter disaster, but the details paint an even more grim picture for the people who attended it.
The more we learn about the “experience,” the more certain we are that it was an actual scam. Imagine paying £35 a ticket (or $40 in USD) to attend a “Willy Wonka” event without chocolatey delights. It’d be like imagining a rainbow without colors, a symphony without music, or a… well, you get the point.
Apparently, not only were the children only given a cup of lemonade and a “single” jelly bean instead of a chocolate bar (!), but the entire narrative was a dozen pages of AI-generated nonsense, featuring a new villain called the Unknown (!!), who is an “evil chocolate maker” and hides in the walls (!!!). What kind of fresh Chitty Chitty Bang Bang hell is this?! The whole thing took place inside an empty warehouse (!!!!) decorated with a few posters and a bouncy castle. (I repeat ⏤ posters and a bouncy castle.) What in the actual Oompa-Loompa is anyone supposed to make of this?
If you need visual context to wrap your head around just how terrible the event was, check out this five-second cringe-inducing clip featuring the evil chocolate maker and titular “Willy Wonka.”
Believe it or not, this is an image from the Oompa Loompa stand, which can also apparently serve as a portable working station for Walter White.
Customers were comparing the Oompa Loompa station to a meth lab pic.twitter.com/MPNiciAlTD
— Culture Crave 🍿 (@CultureCrave) February 28, 2024
The experience was so underwhelming, and the acting so terrible, that several toddlers burst into tears. That’s quite an ingenious way of recreating the sensation the child competitors in the story must have felt upon elimination, if you ask me. Some outraged participants may have also called Police Scotland, because they got involved when the show was cancelled.
The House of Illuminati, which was the event organizer, released a statement apologizing for the fiasco and promising a full refund to every participant. “We fully apologize for what has happened and will be giving full refunds to each and every person that purchased tickets,” the Facebook statement read. Thank goodness ⏤ a heaping plate of justice after not even a spoonful of chocolate.
Here’s a pro tip, folks: The next time you see an event that’s being promoted using AI-generated art (rife with spelling mistakes and improper grammar, I might add)‚ perhaps take the time to thoroughly research the organization behind it or even ask yourself if you’d like to pay money for an experience that can’t even be bothered to use authentic promo material. Because if there’s one thing we can say with certainty, it’s that this kind of thing will definitely happen again in one form or another, especially when AI is involved.
And here we were thinking that the worst thing that could happen to Willy Wonka was Timothée Chalamet.