Trivia: The squirrels were all real and trained, but when they were all put on the set they began to fight. The squirrel scenes had to be done like the Oompa Loompa scenes, taping all the squirrels separately and pasting them together.
Trivia: In the scene with the young Willy Wonka eating a box of chocolates, he is writing down in a notebook a description of each chocolate he eats. When Roald Dahl was at boarding school there was a Cadbury's factory nearby that used the pupils as testers for their new chocolate, and they were asked to write down their comments in much the same way. This is mentioned in his book Boy.
Trivia: In the ribbon-cutting scene when Willy Wonka cuts the ribbon he turns around then his sleeve is covering his hand so all you can see are the scissor blades poking out. This is a reference to a previous Burton/Depp collabaration, "Edward Scissorhands."
Trivia: A camera lens worth over a half-million dollars was destroyed when it fell into the chocolate river during filming.
Trivia: Marc Forster was originally offered the director's position, but turned it down, saying that after Finding Neverland (2004), he vowed never to work with child actors again. Strangely enough, in 2007, he broke that vowel when he directed The Kite Runner.
Trivia: During the sequence in the "Television Room", there are two references to "2001 A Space Odyssey". First, the Oompa-Loompa is watching the scene where the primates are circling around the monolith. Second, as Willy Wonka starts the machine "Also Sprach Zarathustra" by Richard Strauss is played.
Trivia: Five different squirrels were trained to push Mr. Salt into the trash hole.
Trivia: The squirrels in the movie are not CGI, but they're actually weird trained squirrels. There are obviously some parts with CGI, like when they carry Veruca into the pit, but they had about 40 trained squirrels. When they were finished, they gave most of the squirrels to people who wanted them as pets. The others went to zoos.
Trivia: After so many days of filming in the room where everything's edible, Johnny Depp and Tim Burton stated that the supposedly delicious chocolate river started to smell horrible, like rotten eggs.
Answer: The Buckets weren't always dead broke. The TV may have been purchased before they became impoverished.
Phixius ★