Dear Gossips,    

It’s Friday funday and I cannot get enough of the Willy Wonka Experience, an event held in Glasgow, Scotland billed as a “celebration of chocolate in all its delightful forms” that left in kids in tears (so, like actual Willy Wonka…?) and was cancelled mid-go. 

 

The event, put on by House of Illuminati, which itself boasts “extraordinary events and immersive experiences”, charged as much as £35 for tickets—a family of four would run £140—and some people travelled for hours via train only to be greeted by a “partially decorated warehouse” that resulted in some parents calling the police. You can see expectations versus reality here, and the fan edits are wild:

 

The event was inspired by Wonka, which to me, explains everything. Wonka became a hit over the holidays, grossing over $600 million worldwide, and someone decided to quickly capitalize on the renewed popularity of all things magical chocolate and Wonka Con is the result. 

 

Everyone is namechecking Fyre Fest in their writeups, but as an elder Millennial and longtime denizen of Al Gore’s internet, I am old enough to declare with authority: this is Dash Con. It’s giving Tumblr depression posts, it’s giving ball pit:

Ball pit

Look, it’s not funny that people are out dozens if not hundreds of pounds, especially at a time when the cost-of-living crunch is hitting UK residents hard. But it IS funny that people called the police because a Willy Wonka fan event was lame. Someone please release those recordings! It’s got to be at least as funny as any time a cat corners their humans in their own home. “Yes, police? I’m at a Willy Wonka fan event and it’s sh-tty, come immediately!” I can’t stop reading about Wonka Con, whether it’s journalistic write ups of What Went Wrong, or accounts from performers hired to portray the Wonka characters at the event. Credit where it’s due—it sounds like some of the performers really tried to deliver for the kids despite piss poor circumstances. 

 

We’re not even getting to the part where AI allegedly wrote the script for the performers, but that’s definitely part of it! (We’re in the phase where AI is both legit technologically that will have unimaginable impact on our lives in the coming years, and it is part of every scam and fraud from now on.)

So what can we learn from Wonka Con? Well, just as with Dash Con and Fyre Fest, we can learn that it’s really f-cking hard to put on good immersive experiences. Also, this is the true legacy of Wonka. Children now expect Willy Wonka to be their friend, they expect him to be a charming rapscallion with a kindly glint in his eye, when the truth is Willy Wonka is a lie, he is a half-decorated room of despair peopled by dead-eyed actors watching children’s dreams die before them. Us olds know. Willy Wonka is not our friend. Willy Wonka is a trap. Why did anyone expect anything different?

Live long and gossip,

Sarah