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It Looks Like a Meth Lab': What Went Wrong With Willy Wonka Immersive Event; READ
UK event Willy's Chocolate Experience, a magical realm attraction, was a major letdown that customers called the police and criticized by comparing it to a meth lab.
A UK event called Willy's Chocolate Experience, which aimed to transport fans into a magical realm, has been criticized for being compared to a meth lab. The attraction, which charged $44 per person, was not affiliated with the Warner Bros. movie Wonka but advertised it as based on Roald Dahl's creation. The ad copy promised a universe where confectionary dreams were brought to life, with mind-expanding projections, optical marvels, and exhibits.
Exploring what went wrong in the Willy's Chocolate Experience event
The UK event, Willy's Chocolate Experience which is not affiliated with the Warner Bros. movie Wonka, offered customers $44 each had turned out to be an epic letdown that customers called the police and compared the attraction to a meth lab.
The event organizers utilized artificial intelligence to create promotional images that resembled a high-quality attraction, resembling the immersive Wonka-esque world in the ad copy. However, the outcome was different, and ticket buyers needed imagination to imagine it as a fantastical chocolate factory.
According to The Guardian, customers showed up in Glasgow to find “a sparsely decorated warehouse with a scattering of plastic props, a small bouncy castle and some backdrops pinned against the walls.” Scotland police were even called to the scene, the event shut down and parents said their children were in tears. 
The Willy Wonka-inspired event with angry parents and crying children in Dahl's novel is more authentic to Dahl's novel than recent Wonka movies.
The Guardian further added that event organizers refunded tickets and apologized for the very stressful and frustrating day by telling customers, “Unfortunately, last minute we were let down in many areas of our event and tried our best to continue on and push through and now realise we probably should have cancelled first thing this morning instead.”
Here are some tweets criticizing the event;
The Wonka actor who was hired breaks silence on the event's chaos
A stand-up comedian hired to play Willy Wonka at a widely criticised chocolate factory experience has spoken out after furious parents demanded refunds. Billy Coull, organizer of Willy's Chocolate Experience, apologized for not achieving his artistic vision for a well-known book and offered 850 people a refund before closing the Glasgow experience.
One parent complained of arriving to find a “disorganised mini-maze of randomly placed oversized props, a lacklustre candy station that dispersed one jelly bean per child, and a terrifying chrome-masked character that scared many of the kids to tears."
Paul Connell, a 31-year-old Wonka-esque impersonator, shared his experience with The Independent about securing the gig and the chaotic events that followed. “I’m constantly applying for more acting jobs and comedy work, then I got a phone call on Thursday saying, ‘Congratulations you are going to play Willy Wonka, we will send you over the script and dress rehearsal is tomorrow’,” he said.
He continued, “The script was 15 pages of AI-generated gibberish of me just monologuing these mad things. The bit that got me was where I had to say, ‘There is a man we don’t know his name. We know him as the Unknown. This Unknown is an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls.’"
He further added, “It was terrifying for the kids. Is he an evil man who makes chocolate or is the chocolate itself evil? They even misspelt my contract but I do have a legally binding ‘Coontract’ [sic]. But I stayed up all night learning it, thinking this would make sense in the dress rehearsal when I see all the tech.”
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