Another day, another childhood memory-ruining headline. According to Variety, a new Willy Wonka movie is in the works. Warner Bros. has acquired the rights to the beloved character, created by writer Roald Dahl, and plans a new film focused on the “early adventures” of the slightly strange candy maker.

Dahl introduced Willy Wonka in the 1964 book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was the basis of the 1971 cult classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The film, a televised holiday staple for myself and many of you, I’m assuming, starred Gene Wilder as Willy. For our younger readers, the character has become a widely-used and quite popular meme. Dahl was reportedly “disappointed” in the original film, thinking it placed too much emphasis on the wrong character. Liz Attenborough, trustee of the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Center in England, told the BBC that “For him the book was about Charlie.”

Well, I’m sure that the author wouldn’t be jazzed about this version either. I’m assuming that this new film won’t cover the author’s initial details about how Wonka came to employ his candy making Oompa Loompas, who, according to Jeremy Treglown’s book Roald Dahl: A Biography, were described in the original book as “a tribe of 3,000 amiable black pygmies who have been imported by Mr. Willy Wonka from ‘the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before.” Eek.

The new project doesn’t have a cast, a director or a title, but it has a writer in Simon Rich, who wrote for Saturday Night Live and lent his skills to the more family friendly scripts for Inside Out and The Secret Life of Pets.

Needless to say, fans of the original film, released in 1971 (myself included) are not happy about this news. I agree with the fan who tweeted, “There is only one Willy Wonka, Gene Wilder.” Truer words have never been spoken. Gene passed away on August 29 at the age of 83. I sure hope he and Gilda Radner are up there laughing it up together.

Did we learn nothing from Tim Burton’s Willy Wonka remake, 2005’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? That was painful, even for Tim Burton. And if memory serves me right, it kind of marked the decline of Johnny Depp’s run of playing lovable eccentrics (Jack Sparrow notwithstanding). I just don’t see this making a huge splash at the box office.

I do hope they’d at least bring in the remaining living actors from the original movie for cameos. Cool story, Corey: back in my “Con days,” I got to hang out with the actors who played Mike Teevee and Veruca Salt and they couldn’t have been nicer. If you don’t believe me, check out the recent reunion featuring them, as well as the actors who played Charlie, Augustus Gloop, Violet Beauregarde and one of the Oompa Looompas on the TODAY Show. That cast and that story make for magic that can never be duplicated. Now if you’ll pardon me, I’m off to sob quietly in the corner.

Photo credit: Paramount, Getty Images