Review: 'Wonka's the Golden Ticket' resurrects Gene Wilder's voice with AI. The result is lifeless

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Set us as preferred So they’ve turned “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” — which is not to say “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” the 1964 Roald Dahl novel from which the 1971 movie was extruded — into a reality competition series called “Wonka’s the Golden Ticket,” premiering Wednesday on Netflix.Another way of saying this is that they’ve found a new way to dress up “Survivor,” the original — and, heaven help us, still running — task-based themed elimination show.Thanks to home video and cable TV, the film, not accounted as a success in its time, has become lodged in the childhood memories of several generations.

(Cards on the table, I am more a fan of the book than the movie, or of any of the subsequent screen takes.) The most newsworthy aspect of “The Golden Ticket,” besides being the first children’s book to become a reality show, is that it employs an AI rendering of the voice of the late Gene Wilder, who played Wonka in the film, as a narrator, guiding the competition from whatever server it has been stored in.I will waste no time in telling you that the effect is terrible, a lifeless voice not so much from beyond the grave as buried in it.The pretense is that the contestants, who have not randomly received a Golden Ticket, are being given a tour of the Wonka factory, at the end of which one lucky tourist will receive “a lifetime supply of money.” Like Charlie Bucket visiting the Wonka factory with Grandpa Joe, they come in pairs, though one partner may be separated from the other before the end — “terminated from the tour” — depending on how the chips, or gumballs or licorice twists, may fall.Contestants’ backstories are provided to make you care for some; others show themselves to be less sympathetic.

That these sort of games, with their duplicity, hypocrisies a...