'Roald Dahl would hate this': Wonka's The Golden Ticket is branded 'cheap' and a 'ghoulish misuse of AI Gene Wilder' in a series of savage reviews

After splashing a rumoured £500million to buy the rights to Roald Dahl's back catalogue, Netflix have released their latest by-product of the author's imagination.

The streamer has turned Dahl's beloved 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory into a Squid Game: The Challenge-esque survival show.

Wonka's The Golden Ticket sees 24 Golden Ticket winners enter the chocolate factory to compete in a series of games inspired by the children's novel and its beloved 1971 movie adaptation.

Instead of a lifetime supply of chocolate, there's a lifetime supply of money up for grabs (packaged as a six-figure salary for 30 years), if the competitors can make it through games set in recreations of the movie's sets, including a vast chocolate river and the Wonkavision studio.

Netflix has also enlisted AI audio firm ElevenLabs to re-create 1971 Wonka Gene Wilder's voice ten years after his death. Meanwhile Rusty Goffe, who featured in the film, is reviving his role as head Oompa Loompa.

The streamer is already heavily publicising its scripted Dahl adaptations, recently greenlighting a drama series based on the author's short stories, but in the interim Wonka's Chocolate Factory feels like a moneygrabbing stopgap to keep the Dahl universe in conversation.

Critics have taken aim at the show in a series of savage reviews, declaring 'Dahl would hate this.'

Writing for The Telegraph, Benji Wilson awards the show just one star, hitting out at the formulaic padding used to fill eight hours. 'So much time, so little to do: the whole thing is distended more than Mike Teavee after a session in the gum-stretching room,' he decides.

'There are eight hours, incredibly, of hopefuls wandering around on edible grass and overreacting furiously to things they must know are fake.'

Pointing out that Dahl's character, the binge-watching, nine-year-old Mike Teavee 'ironically would have loved' the show, Wilson says 'as for Roald Dahl? I suspect not.'

Variety's Alison Herman takes aim at the show's 'ghoulish misuse of AI Gene Wilder'.

'Wonka’s Golden Ticket notes in a disclaimer that the production received the permission of Wilder’s estate for this aural resurrection, presumably in exchange for money,' she writes.

'Even if the AI voice is legally sanctioned, however, it still invites a host of other questions. Such as: was this really necessary? Could there possibly be more gained from using Wilder’s nasal croon than lost in viewers put off by the manipulation of a dead man’s image (or rather, sound) for a game show?' 

Vicky Jessop for NME awards the show two stars agrees, writing 'just like AI-Gene Wilder, the soul of Wonka’s Golden Ticket is missing.'

The review points out that the reality show format 'ends up undercutting the very point of the IP it has so cheerfully butchered. Roald Dahl’s book was one giant cautionary tale.'

'Any of the misfortunes the children brought on themselves was due to their own greed or stupidity. Here though, greed and stupidity is very much encouraged in the name of entertainment.'

The Guardian's Phil Harrison agrees, saying the show 'seems to point in the opposite moral direction to the creation which spawned it'.

'Don’t expect Charlie Buckets here – doing the right thing, resisting the everlasting gobstopper. Instead, resign yourself to a factory full of Veruca Salts: blithe, easily manipulated, wanting everything right now.'