Pop Culture | 70s | Movies
'Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory' Star Returns To TV And Everyone Was Freaking Out
Watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as a kid was basically a requirement. Pretty much everyone had to watch it, otherwise everyone else would think you were crazy.
Seeing all those bratty kids roam around the chocolate factory, demanding Wonka explain all of his eccentric genius is one of those things that I think was supposed to make me think Wonka was being mean, but really it just made me hate those kids - even Charlie. I know he was technically the hero of the story, but even he broke off from the group and invaded a space he wasn't supposed to.
I know that's the point of the movie, but I get why Wonka was annoyed by the end. He's got a kid ruining his chocolate river, there's one who ate something she was specifically told not to that's a lawsuit waiting to happen, one who's definitely plotting to steal his livestock, and then a fourth one whose obsession with television turned him into a pocket sized child.
Sure, in the end he settled on Charlie, the kid who stole drinks because an old man told him to, but let's be honest, Wonka deserved better.
However, as terrible as those kids were, they were just acting. The real children are actually quite sweet and when they all reunited a couple of years ago they revealed that they were all encouraged to be bad.
"Usually your parents are telling you, 'Don't do this. Don't do that,' and we had Mel Stuart, our director, saying 'Be meaner.'" Julie Dawn Cole, the former Veruca Salt said.
While the kids got to be mean on camera, when they weren't on screen the kids bonded. "We think of ourselves as a family," Paris Themmen, aka Mike TeeVee said. "Maybe a bit of a dysfunctional family, but..."
It's not a group we see very often, but every once and a while they pop back up and catch us off guard. One of those stars recently appeared on TV and his fans had a field day...
People often wonder what happened to their favorite childhood stars, but with a lot of the stars from before the internet, they were able to successfully get off the grid before chasing fame became their whole lives.
You don't really hear much about the Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory kids anymore, but recently when one of them turned up on television it reminded us that they were all still out there.
Paris Themmen, played the TV-obsessed Mike TeeVee in the iconic film, and now he made us all do a double take when he turned up where none of us would have expected, on Jeopardy!.
Themmen appeared on the show using his real name, but his famous past was completely glossed over, and instead he was called an "entrepreneur" who enjoys backpacking around the world.
It didn't take long for people to connect the dots though, and were so excited to see that Mike Teevee had made it onto TV!
Themmen's wife, Nikki Grillos, actually had a three day run on Jeopardy! back in 2015. While his wife won twice, Themmen didn't get that lucky. He did however come in second place with an impressive total of $6,800.