J-pop Deep (updated)
I’m not sure noted misanthropist and writer Roald Dahl ever expected a Punjabi African midget who’s voiced a Tim Burton movie to don the Oompa on a prop sheet like a Japanese bubble gum wrapper.
But here we are. Gordeep in Charanjit and the Choco-Candy Godown. FSM bless America and Japan.
By the way, how cool is it that Mohinder Purba chose Gordeep Roy as a Kenyan stage name. Was that more marketable?
Update: Through the magic of Wikipedia and Little Girl Blue, we find that Dahl rendered ‘bizarre’ as African pygmies. It’s the inverse of the original desi Sambo:
The original book first portrayed Oompa-Loompas as black pygmies from “the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before”. After the book’s U.S. release, complaints of racism caused Dahl to rewrite the characters as dwarves with “golden-brown hair” and “rosy-white” skin… [Link]
Two of the original Oompas were apparently brown people, Adel and Hussein Farhat and Ismed Hassan.
An episode of Mind of Mencia attacked Tim Burton for only using one Oompa-Loompa in the entire film. Several Oompa-Loompas appear and start singing about how they lost their jobs, and have been forced to turn to prostitution… The 1967 Beatles song ‘I Am the Walrus’ contains the vocal “Oompa oompa, stick it up your jumpa” under the outro. [Link]
That last line puts me in mind of a dirty ditty, but I’d never imply anything about a famous author and her new baby. That would be tasteless.
on Friday, February 1st, 2008, 10:16 am in Film, Photographs › 
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Actually, he kind of did. The original Oompa-Loompas were African, until an editor convinced Dahl that his depiction was horribly racist and so he changed them to the wacky “out-of-this-world” creatures we know today.
You can still find editions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with the original illustrations, which depict the Oompa-Loompas as “pickaninny” types.
If you’re curious, here are the original illustrations compared to the revised ones, and…
Here are copies of the letters exchanged between Dahl and his editors in which they ordered the revision.
Someday I’m going to get a full-time job as a fact checker. *__^ (Or… um… a supermarket checker. Probably more likely.)