Grandpa Joe Sucks

Last night, while doing some proofreading, I watched the Charlie Brown Valentine's Day special. Alas, the special didn't answer the biggest lingering question about the Peanuts gang: Why does Linus have a deformed head? Is it a birth defect? Was he dropped on his head? Did Lucy kick him?

I also watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which retains the same huge flaw as the book and the original movie: That Charlie takes Grandpa Joe (one of the legendary slackers in cinema history) to the factory instead of his hard working parents. Grandpa Joe, Mr. "Oh, I must lay in bed all day for I am so very elderly and weak...oh, wait, chocolate factory?...look, I can walk again!" During the tour, he never even gets winded.

In the new version, the odious Grandpa Joe tells Charlie about how he used to work at the chocolate factory. Keep in mind that Charlie is so obsessed with the factory that he has very slowly built a replica of it out of discarded toothpaste caps, and his birthday present each year is a single bar of Willy Wonka's chocolate. Grandpa Joe is only NOW telling him that he used to work there?

The movie doesn't call him out, but I will: Grandpa Joe is a damned liar. No doubt during those "factory working" years he was pulling a con on some other family. Sadly, despite the myriad death traps that claim the children during the tour, Grandpa Joe survives and no doubt plops his ass right back in bed, living out his remaining years with Oompa-Loompahs giving him sponge baths and feeding him bon-bons.