Willy Wonka's Father Was a Dentist? Now It all Makes Sense

I saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory last night and was very impressed. I know it's been getting a bad rap from a lot of people and I was very skeptical, but I actually enjoyed it.

One of the reasons I was skeptical was because I love the old Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and felt like nothing could compare. But the new one was so different than the old one that I didn't feel the need to compare the two. (And Johnny Depp was not quite as freaky as I thought he would be, though the Michael Jackson comparison is fairly accurate.)

The most noticeable addition to the new movie was a backstory for Willie Wonka: his father was a dentist who never let him have candy, and of course that made him into a candymaker. Interesting...

But it kinda made me think: how much of us is made by our families? Are we truly products of our parents and our siblings and how we were raised? While I don't think any of us are quite as uncomplicated as Willy Wonka's loving chocolate because his father was a dentist (which reminds me, I really hafta go to the dentist...), our parents do have a profound affect on the way we turn out.

And maybe that's a pretty obvious thing to say but family is a big deal, and parents literally have the ability to mold a person. It's a pretty big responsibility.