Re watched it and finally realised he was just telling a story and none of it actually happened I feel sick.
shareThe story within the story is anomalous besides:
-He gives the characters their same names and identities, including Grandpa Potts and Truly's father, who is captured by the spies.
-Truly falls in love with Caractacus in the story, but in real life that was not established.
-The song about Chitty being "fantasmagorical" and "wizard", or anything exceptional, loses its meaning.
I think it was written and filmed as a complete fantasy story, but then changed for some reason.
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The story is king.
it is a very disappointing ending.
sharethe car flies off at the end so I think it is somewhat gray
I think the film was very successful in the sense of sort of reflecting something that happens in everyday life- people have dreams and could swear that they really happened or where just like real life in some aspect (a premonition, an exact memory, etc.)
I don't see how they 'waking up' from a dream necessarily declares anything. And even if we are to say it was certainly a dream then why is that so terrible? it was a fascinating dream and frankly its not as if in the realm of reality anyone really believes a car magically will fly
If i go crazy will you still call me Superman?
I had the same revelation.
In my memory from having watched it multiple times on VHS as a kid, I was always convinced that the Vulgaria parts actually did happen.
I was very confused if it was real or not as a kid, I think having the car really fly at the end was what made me confused.
I don't think that the car really flew at the end. I think it was sort of a fun way to end it and have kids think about. It never really concerned me when I watched it as a kid. I just thought that the movie was having us wonder what was and what wasn't actually real.
shareYou're one in a million. and the car does fly away at the end, so...
shareI just feel really dumb that I can have watched this movie several times and only just realized this and I am past fifty now. It is oddly comforting that others were confused or felt it was ambiguous. More than that, it IS, in fact, inescapably ambiguous!
A summary, including the fatal dialogue (spoilers, obviously)! Chitty Chitty Bang Bang rescues Caractacus Potts, Truly Scrumptious, Jeremy, and Jemima Potts, and also Grandpa, earlier abducted by the villains, and the five (six, counting the car) happily take off--the car is revealed to be a helicopter as well as a plane.
In the next scene, the four who went to the beach (Caractacus, Truly, Jeremy, and Jemima) are sitting in the car, parked at the beach. They are not shown landing, and Grandpa is not with them. (This seems to have escaped me and others even on seeing the film several times.)
CARACTACUS: And so, after that, Vulgaria became a free country. And all the children laughed and played and they were very happy. And Chitty flew high over the mountains back to England, everybody safe and sound and--
JEMIMA: And Daddy and Truly were married.
JEREMY: And lived happily ever after.
TRULY: Is that how the story ends?
CARACTACUS: It's getting late. We'd better get back.
This makes the ending, of the car flying over the landscape, EXTREMELY open to interpretation. Was this elaborate story a hint from Caractacus that he had fixed the car to fly, but did not want to say so directly in case it did not work as his other inventions had gone wrong? Was the car actually magic, and Caractacus did not know it, but wished, or even suspected it? Did the car actually fly at the end, or was that part imaginary or symbolic of his feelings from having succeeded? Or did he actually fix it to fly and now that an invention had succeeded, he felt brave enough to actually fly it? Gray as all get-out!
Never occurred to me that the car might not be flying at the end - but an argument could be made that even the final flight was metaphorical, representing how happy all the characters were.
Unlike "Grease," where Sandy is at least nominally surprised when Greased Lightning takes off, Caractacus and Truly don't seem remotely surprised.
Still & all, I believe the Vulgaria part is unambiguous - Caractacus made it all up on the beach. He's an inventor, after all. Although I, also, didn't realize until my twenties that it WAS all a fiction within the film.
Like the Land of Oz all being a dream, which was NOT that way in the book, as in this case--the car really flew in the book!
shareI've never watched this film start to finish, although I must have watched it 30+ times on TV. With commercials I think it's an 8 hour show (j/k but it's long and just not that good IMO.)
share