Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

A song in which candy-shop owner Bill and the children sing Wonka's praises, showing how the town sees him before the hero ever appears.

• In the film it is sung by Aubrey Woods, who plays the shop owner. Long before Wonka appears, it paints him as a wizard of candy, so that we later hear it against Wilder's Wonka.
• A soloist sings a phrase and the children's chorus answers in a give-and-take (call and response) structure, so the shop quickly turns into one big playground.
• The following year, Sammy Davis Jr.'s recording spent 3 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the only chart-topper of his career. He himself reportedly disliked the song, finding it too childish.
• Heard back to back, the film version and the Davis version let you hear the same melody change costume, from a children's song into a grown-up's showstopper.

A song in which the mother, at the washing, comforts her listless son, portraying both the poverty of Charlie's home and the tenderness within it.

• The words tell him to cheer up, but the melody moves slowly and low, carrying the worry of the one doing the comforting.
• Unlike the earlier candy-shop chorus, this is sung almost alone, a contrast that shows how different the volume of two worlds can be within the same town.
• The song has long divided audiences for slowing down the story. Yet that slowness can also be read as showing how time passes in a poor household.

A song of joy sung by Charlie, ticket in hand, and Grandpa Joe, walking again, as they circle the room.

• The march-like rhythm, stepping out crisply in two, overlaps with the old man's first steps out of bed, so the song sounds like the body's recovery itself.
• Grandfather and grandson sing in turn and then join together, making it a scene of two generations sharing the same joy.
• As the song ends on the beat, its theme carries on in the orchestra, and this melody returns later as a brief signal pointing to Charlie's good fortune.

A song in which Wonka, after the door to the chocolate room opens, introduces his guests to a world of imagination; it is the central melody of the whole film.

• The opening, starting low as if spoken and gradually shifting into song, was tailored to the voice of Gene Wilder, an actor rather than a singer. That hesitancy makes Wonka all the harder to read.
• Bricusse recalled that he and Newley wrote the song over the phone in a single day.
• It drew little notice on release, and the original recording never even charted. Since then countless singers, among them Lou Rawls (1976) and Fiona Apple (2013), have taken it up anew.
• The melody returns in full orchestral force in the final elevator scene. The same tune frames the beginning and the end, functioning as a single theme.
• In the week after Wilder's death in 2016, streams and sales of the song rose sharply, and it was sung again in the 2023 film Wonka.

Each time a child is eliminated, the Oompa-Loompas appear and tack on a moral, setting new words to the same melody like a refrain.

• It appears several times in the film, but the melody barely changes. As the same frame repeats, the audience comes to anticipate the next elimination, and the song keeps time for the story.
• Sung in short, simple phrases clipped to a precise beat, it lands as neatly as the moral tacked onto the end of a fable.
• On the soundtrack the song is bundled into tracks with cues from other scenes and appears several times, showing that repetition is the very nature of the piece.

The passage in which Wonka recites an ever-quickening poem in the dark tunnel on the chocolate river, often named the most frightening scene in the film.

• Rather than sung, the melody is recited almost as speech, with sound effects and the orchestra laid beneath it. Poised on the border between song and dialogue, the approach is close to the technique of setting music beneath recitation.
• Tension builds as the pace and pitch of the recitation steadily rise. That the same voice that earlier sang of imagination now breeds unease reveals the two faces of Wonka as a character.
• People still debate why such a scene found its way into a children's film. It is sometimes read as a signal that the factory is by no means a safe playground.

The song of Veruca, the rich man's daughter who demands a goose that lays golden eggs right now, portraying greed as slapstick farce.

• Built on the same demand repeated over and over, the song itself sounds as stubborn as a child throwing a tantrum.
• Actress Julie Dawn Cole sang the song as Veruca. The scene is said to have been reshot thirty-six times.
• Where the song ends, the Oompa-Loompas' refrain picks up again, and on the soundtrack the two are bound together as a single track.

The music for the final scene, in which the glass elevator bursts through the factory roof and soars into the sky, as the melody of imagination returns in the orchestra.

• At the decisive moment the music almost withdraws, returning quietly only once the choice is made. The gap in which the music holds its tongue is what gives the ending its weight.
• The melody one man sang in the chocolate room now resounds broadly through the full strings and winds. Simply by expanding the same theme, the music conveys that the story has come back to where it began and is complete.
• The orchestral arrangement was the work of Walter Scharf. His weaving of Bricusse and Newley's songs into the film's entire underscore was nominated alongside them for the Academy Award for Best Adaptation·Song Score.