I saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on Sunday night and, among other subtle 21st century additions included in the update by director Tim "Film God" Burton, Mike TeeVee, the original gun-totin'-cowboy-lovin-TV-obsessed little kid, was armed with a computer game controller. Well, you can just imagine what kind of young tyke he was: surly, violent and generally embittered.
While midly embarassed and irritated by this choice, it struck me that, apart from the game controller, the Mike TeeVee character was essentially the same as that which Roald Dahl wrote in 1964 and Paris Themmen brought to the silver screen in the Gene Wilder-helmed 1971 version. This addition/omission (depending on which way you look at it) gives fuel to my fire that computer games are simply the latest social pariah, as television was only three decades ago. Either that or maybe Bart Simpson was right when he wisely said, "If I don't look at the violence, how will I become desensitized to it?"
I also found it rather ironic that a film which made such a social comment about comptuer games has a very successful computer game tied into it.
