All my homies hate Grandpa Joe.
This is the first time I’ve ever noticed the extra in the background slowly realizing that the android has learned blood lust.
Do I need to do my grandpa Joe defense rant? Because I can.
For shits and giggles, I say yay!
Remember, you asked for it lol. It is long, so wall of text warning.
Aight, I enjoy the joke too.
However! I encourage people to remember that grandpa joe is not a faker in the world he’s from!
Since the movie is what most peeps remember, and where the memes usually come from, the first thing to remember is that it’s a musical.
Musicals, by the established rules of the overall genre, do not reflect reality at all times. Even mostly dramatic musicals like Man of LaMancha break some reality in order to function as musicals. Take the scene with the ruffians and “Dulcinea” as an example.
Second, the movie. Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory is essentially a fantasy piece. You’ve got the Oompa Loompas as prime evidence of that. Orange skinned humanoids that do not exist in the real world (jokes aside). Many things in the chocolate factory break the laws of physics or otherwise bend reality. There’s geese laying golden eggs, ffs.
Third, the theme of the movie isn’t actually torturing children. The theme of the movie is the redemptive and uplifting power of dreams. That’s achieved by the journey of Charlie getting his golden ticket and everything in his life getting better.
Grandpa Joe hasn’t been laying there in bed faking it (though, in movie, there’s never anything about the grandparents being unable to move or walk at all, they’re just frail and weak).
He is in his eighties or nineties.
What gets him up and dancing isn’t that he was faking and forgot to, it’s joy.
GJ is transformed by joy, by happiness. His grandson has, through luck or destiny, gotten the golden ticket to a brighter, better life! This doesn’t trick Joe into forgetting his infirmity. It gives him the joy to overcome it.
Joe’s transformation, rejuvenation, is because he is so filled with joy that his grandson will have a new life, that it changes him into the grandfather he wished he could be. Don’t forget that he had sacrificed his one real pleasure to give Charlie a chance at that.
But, look, I know that the grandpajoehate is ostensibly a meme. It’s a joke poking fun at the very musical rules that allow a bed-bound person to magically be cured in the first place. But it never acknowledges the fact that his spontaneous rejuvenation is magic, and that the magic is the magic of love.
In a cynical world, we believe that love is not transformative because the real world grinds us down. But love can be transformative for us too. We just have to be willing to let it work.
I can abide the rules and suspension of disbelief of “Musical Magic” for that scenario.
In a “real world” scenario, where Wonka is a megalomaniac-sweatshop tyrant-sadist and candy sales can swing a country’s economy, Grandpa Joe’s miraculous recovery is the least of our problems.
It’s also worth noting that a movie can have multiple themes, including both child torture and the power of dreams.
Imagining the horror of a child Charlie’s age becoming the CEO of Nestle and on their first day learning all about it’s history and present operations
“Am I the guy doing to boat tour now?”
Do we have best of on lemmy? This would go there imo
I like this interpretation. Also would note that for those with chronic illness debility can frequently wax and wane.
Interesting defense, but it still doesn’t justify his cocaine habit
I now imagine Picard in Wonka’s office, telling Joe off about the Fizzy Lifting Drink: “The line must be drawn here! This far, no further! GOOD DAY SIR!”
Thank you, kindly!
It looks like Mozart is about to kill me!
Would you like to employ the help of Salieri to fend him off?
F. Murray Abraham played both Salieri in Amadeus and Ru’afo in Star Trek Insurrection.
That is beautiful.
Maybe Grandpa Joe just got some of that medicine that Admiral Jameson used in Too Short a Season?
Then we should expect him to die a painful death rather shortly.
Sure we do. Fraud is a prosecutable offense
But in the 24th century, how would they sentence him? X amount of time incarcerated, wherein he would… do nothing? Certainly not a labor camp, as that would likely violate their principles. I guess, perhaps, Argrathi mind prison?
Put him on the line with the oompah loompahs
Make him relive his crime every few hours like Tom Paris in that one episode.
“Oh no, it’s starting again!”
Vision of laying in bed, bored out of his fucking skull
“Ahhhhhhh!”
I like the way you think.
