1. The film is based on Roald Dahl's 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
2. After Mike is shrunken into near oblivion by his trip through the airwaves and his mother is escorted to the taffy-pulling room to see what can be done, a chorus of Oompa Loompas sing, “What do you get from a glut of TV? / A pain in the neck and an IQ of three. / Why don't you try simply reading a book? / Or can you just not bear to look? / You'll get no … you'll get no … you'll get no commercials.”
3. When Mike expresses his displeasure at not being allowed to have one, his father chimes in with, “Not 'til you're twelve, son.”
4. W. James Potter, Media Literacy, 4th ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008), 69. Potter, a professor of communications at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an expert on media literacy, characterizes this attitude as being held by both “the public and policy makers” (69).
5. Norma Pecora, “The Changing Face of Children's Television,” in Thinking Outside the Box: A Contemporary Television Genre Reader, ed. Gary R. Edgerton and Brian G. Rose (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 91–110; Heather Hendershot, Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation before the V-Chip (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 7. Jason Mittell's concept of a cultural approach to studying genres is integral to Pecora's argument, which she acknowledges. Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004).