“The suspense is terrible. I hope it’ll last.”

The first casualty of Wonka’s factory tour is the rotund German glutton Augustus Gloop (Michael Bollner), who takes a tumble into a chocolate river. He’s dragged along by a saccharine undertow until he’s sucked up into a vacuum shoot.

Augustus effectively blocks the tube’s flow until the pressure behind him builds into a frenzy. While his mother is having a conniption, Wonka watches entranced, saying, “The suspense is terrible, I hope it’ll last,” as it’s only a matter of time until Augustus rockets up the tube and into God-knows-what on the other side.

Though it seems tailor-made for the mischievous Willy Wonka, the line comes to us via the fanciful Gwendolen in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Like Wonka, she has a flair for the melodramatic and theatrical, so it seems natural that he’d borrow her turn of phrase.