John Lindal’s Blog

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

I finally watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory a few days ago. It’s a great movie. I’ve seen the original version, and this one definitely had a better ending. But what really got me was when Mike TeeVee was enjoying himself in the first scene inside the factory. He was smashing pumpkins.

Why pumpkins? Well, I’m old enough to have spent way too many hours playing Doom back when it was state-of-the-art. Enough hours that I still remember the cheat codes for it. “idspispopd,” the command to allow you to walk through walls, was a real finger-full to type. I did some research way back then and discovered that spispopd was the name of a game: Smashing Pumpkins into Small Piles of Putrid Debris.

And, yes, I’ve played that, too