When I was growing up, I never realized that some people watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory through the lens of a horror film. On the surface, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a simple and fun story chocked full of a few morality tales personified by the mischievous children the titular Charlie encounters. However, I've come to find out that some people view Willy Wonka as a murderous monster that exacts cruel punishments on children for expressing mild character defects.
Watching a character like Augustus Gloop plunge into a chocolate river because of his greed seemed perfectly fair in a movie. Hearing about employees at the Mars Wrigley factory suffering a similar fate by falling into a vat of chocolate seems significantly less fitting, even if still incredibly hilarious. According to the AV Club, that's exactly what happened to two employees that worked for the famous confectionary company. All that's left to do is summon the Oompa Loompas or, in this case, OSHA.
In the summer of last year, when the northern hemisphere's sugary treats were at their stickiest, an accident occurred at Elizabeth, Pennsylvania's Mars Wrigley factory: Two contract workers fell into a vat of Dove chocolate and were saved after a rescue team arrived to cut them out of their sweet, sweet prison.
Details of the incident have since surfaced and been reported by the BBC, which headlines the story not by pointing out how a serious industrial accident resembles a whimsical scene of child endangerment from a classic film but by pointing out that the factory has been fined $14,500 by the Occupational Safety And Health Administration (OSHA).
The report explains that the contract workers' chocolatey dilemma required "more than two dozen rescuers" to solve and occurred because the two "were hired to clean tanks, and were not provided with proper safety training."
