I have been obsessed.

Quick rundown: parents in Scotland called the police they were so enraged by an event that promised to replicate the magical world of Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory, but instead turned out to be a grim, sparsely-decorated warehouse in Glasgow, with sad Oompa-Loompas, a made-up, terrifying character called The Unknown, and, worst of all - no chocolate.

The tickets to the "Willy's Chocolate Experience" were 35 pounds ($AU68) and parents claim they were duped into buying them by the entertainment company using AI imagery showing a world of "pure imagination" that turned out to be closer to The Late Show's infamous Pissweak World.

Sad, spare decorations. Only one half-filled cup of lemonade and one jelly bean per child. Actors left to their own devices. All in a bleak, cold cement-floored warehouse with a lonely already-deflating jumping castle in one corner and a tiny cardboard chocolate river in the other.

The show was shut down half-way through its first day, but quickly became a global sensation, sparking a tsunami of memes and prompting people to connect it with that other online obsession - the whereabouts of Kate Middleton. Was she, perhaps, The Unknown?

People have been celebrating the sheer and utter crapness of the event, the shoulder-shrugging audacity of the organisers and the desperate details that emerged tweet by tweet.

The actor playing Willy Wonka said the script was 15 pages of "AI-generated gibberish". The Unknown was an evil chocolate maker who "lives in the walls" - just because. The just-make-do-ness of it all was riveting.

"At the end, I was supposed to soak up The Unknown with a giant vacuum cleaner, very Luigi's Mansion style," actor Paul Connell told Wired.

"There wasn't a giant vacuum cleaner. I was told by the people running it to improvise, and I didn't know how to improvise having a vacuum cleaner without a vacuum cleaner. It takes skill that I do not have."

Crying.

Like any viral sensation, the original event has created a spin-off industry. The memes have been unreal. People are already planning to dress as The Unknown for Halloween. A change.org petition calling for the "beloved" Glasgow Willy Wonka experience to be re-opened has been signed by more than 5000 people.

The community notes on X have been as entertaining as the original tweets:

"Jain Edwards did not play 'The Unknown' at the Willy Wonka Experience in Glasgow. As shown on her X account, Edwards was in Leicester on the weekend which the event occurred."

Of course she was.

It all reminds me of Canberra's own Willy Wonka Experience: the One Big Day party on Lake Burley Griffin in 2013 to celebrate the city's centenary.

Shudder.

While the organisers couldn't see a problem with it, the so-called party of the century left the average punter walking around dazed and in disbelief. Was this really all there was? (Still can't get over the installation encouraging people to tie scraps of plastic to a steel fence left on the lake foreshore. #Triggered.)

If nothing else, the Willy Wonka Experience showed that people around the world can have a laugh together - and X is not dead yet. Far from it.