Alright, I've been avoiding wading into this, but since people are being pissy with me anyways I might as well earn it.
Putting on my design pedant hat, I really want to know what intern at Warner Bros screwed everyone over with this half assed logo, so prominently featured on the SE. They took a wonderfully whimsical piece of typography, and ran it through the wringer until it looks like crap, and it's a damn shame. It's been bugging me since I first saw it. I got inspired by the boring complaints to get to the bottom of it, so here's a hopefully non-boring, or at least overly detailed, complaint to break things up.
First thing I did was hunt down some original movie posters from the film's debut. Here's an example of one:
willy_wonka_and_the_chocolate_factory_xlg (resized).jpg
Nothing particularly special really, a little dated feeling by our modern standards, but I like it fine. But for our purposes all that matters is the logo at the bottom. Someone hand lettered that, it's clearly not a font, especially given the era we're talking about. No computer warping typography then. That's a great piece of work, really fits the character of the film. Dates things to that era of psychedelic type, but that's okay, we're talking about an older movie here.
Now compare it with this bit from the game:
The life has absolutely been sucked out of it. They're trying to hide it with all the colors and shading and outlines, but the basic shapes are just mangled.
Look at the H in "chocolate", in the original lettering the connecter between the two sides is a little ball, like a piece of candy. In the Warner Bros version it's just a lumpy mess. No sign of the ball at all. Look all the inside top of the C in "factory", see how on the original it curves in smoothly to a little point? The remake has a sloppy artifact poking out instead. Same with the curves inside the T next to it, weird chunks instead of curves. That artifacting is all over the logo. The smooth curves are chunky, the proportions are sloppy and don't connect right, and the whole thing looks like it was badly traced by that woman who ruined the Jesus painting and got internet famous.
I'll tell you what the intern did. They took the original poster, or probably a crappy photo of it, and brought it into Adobe Illustrator. Then they ran an auto-vectorize filter on it, to turn all the shapes into editable objects, rather than taking 45 minutes to do it all by hand. And then they took the filter result and ... called it a day. Went to get lunch, emailed the file out, and never looked at it again.
Here's some proof. I took the H I like so much, and brought it into Illustrator, and did just that, ran an auto trace on it. Then I did my own hand drawn version. Took a couple minutes, this isn't actually difficult stuff. Look at the difference here. I could have used a more high rez source to be truly accurate with the details, but I think you get the point:
Here's what the linework looks like between my hand drawn and the auto trace in more detail. You can really see how not only is the ball connector totally lost, but the curves around the ends of the letter are lumpy and inconsistent, not smooth, or are done as straight lines without any of the hand drawn character. You can't follow the line of the side of the H from the top to the bottom with your eye as a continuous shape. The auto trace isn't that smart, it just takes a best guess stab at things, you need a human hand to guide it:
This isn't JJP's fault, as far as I can tell Warner Bros put zero effort into their own franchise, and JJP had to use what they were given. But damn, what a wreck. And if that's all you've got to work with? Please don't make it the only art on the side of your game! I know some people roll their eyes at font talk, but this is really painfully obvious stuff. If Dirty Donny had drawn the Metallica logo wrong people would have been pitchforking.