It’s too bad that I didn’t look behind the curtain of all my favorite TV shows and movies when I was a kid. I certainly missed a lot of juicy, intelligent stuff that was trying to reach my hypnotized brain. Years and years later, while rewatching the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with Gene Wilder, I realized that the ditty Wonka plays in his musical lock is not from a Rachmaninoff composition as the character, Mrs. Teevee, so arrogantly states. It’s from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. This was not an error made by the movie’s writers. The scene, and many others in the movie, is a character-building one that defines an adult stereotype that Mrs. Teevee represents. The child characters in the movie are meant to guide the child viewers against misbehaving…but the adult characters in the movie are also there to make a statement towards viewing adults. Looking at the scene now, it seems to me that the movie itself takes an arrogant stance, evinced by the fact that Willy Wonka does not correct Mrs. Teevee’s mistake. Anyone who knows well the music of Rachmaninoff or Mozart will know something's up, but those who are not educated in classical music have no choice but to assume that Mrs. Teevee is correct, especially since her claim is stated with such confidence. This leads the viewer into joining Mrs. Teevee in her arrogance. The bait is quite easy to take. The viewer is left on their own to figure out who to follow or look up to in this moment. Later in the movie, Mrs. Teevee's love for and sense of motherly duty to her son to any end could be considered endearing as she leaves the movie with a miniature Mike in her purse. If you saw her as a source of intelligence and strength, she still evinces this as she walks off the Wonkavision set, chin held high with determination and resignation that her son went off the rails due to his own arrogance. But will mother or son learn anything from their experience? Will the viewer?

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