Tuesday, December 18, 2007

What became of Grandpa George?

Last night around four in the morning, I awoke from some weird dreams in which I went to bed with several of our friends. I don't mean I had sex with them (if you're a friend reading, sorry for the suggested visualization.) I mean sort of like a camping trip or a slumber party or something, Elaine and I crawled into bed with some of our friends and went to sleep. The friend next to me was wearing a frumpy nightgown. Weird.

Anyway, the first image that popped into my head of several people in the same bed was from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory when Charlie's grandparents are all bedridden in the living room of their humble pauper's apartment. Actually all the grandparents weren't in the same bed. One set of grandparents slept in one tiny bed as I recall and the other slept in another. These people ate cabbage stew for dinner. It's not like they had a Wamsutta king size or knew their sleep numbers or anything.

There was Grandpa Joe of course, who ends up going to the chocolate factory with Charlie, and Grandpa Joe's wife was Grandma Josephine. I don't know for certain, but something tells me these were Charlie's mom's parents. Then there was Grandpa George and Grandma Georgina. Likewise I think these were Charlie's dad's parents though I'm not sure. It's been forever since I've seen the movie and, as best as I can remember, it doesn't really go into a lot of backstory about Charlie's life.

Did Grandpa George ever have any lines? I know it's an odd question and all, but this is what I laid awake trying to remember. Did Grandpa George . . . have any lines? I honestly can't remember if he did or not, and while I did manage to eventually fall asleep without resolving the issue, the question still weighs on my mind. Was it a speaking role? Or did he simply lie there in the bed and just re-act to the other actors?

Aside from Grandpa Joe who we see in almost the whole movie, I don't think we see the grandparents except in a couple of scenes, do we? Let's see -- there's that scene where Charlie gets home from school, then there's that scene where the old folks are listening in on the wireless and hear that all the golden tickets have been found and then there's that scene where Charlie comes bounding in like his mom forgot to give him his hyper medicine or something saying he found the last golden ticket and that it's not bootleg. If there were lines written for Grandpa George it would have likely been during one of these last two scenes I think.

The Internet Movie Database claims that the role was played by Ernst Ziegler and that sadly it was his last role before dying of emphysema in 1974. Sadder still is that his name apparently didn't even appear in the credits of the film. He doesn't have much of a rap sheet with IMDB either so he'll likely best be known to most for his roles in such gems as The Naked Countess and Naughty Knickers, both German movies that came out in 1971 and 1970 respectively.

It really only just dawned on me that of all the things I could lay awake thinking about (predeterminism vs. free will, life on other planets, Cousin Oliver's disappearance from The Brady Bunch) whether an uncredited actor had any lines or not in a film is probably one of the most obscure. But did he have any lines? I don't know that I'm going to clog up my Netflix queue with some 1970s dwarfsploitation to find out, so someone is just going to have to tell me.

Besides, those Oompa Loompas? A little on the scary side.

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