YMMV / Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

• Accidental Innuendo: When Truly crashes her car into the river (again), Caractacus tells her, "You'll find a slight squeeze on the hooter an excellent safety precaution."
• Adaptation Displacement: Generally speaking, more people are familiar with the movie than the fact that there even was a book first, let alone who wrote it. Said book also has the family go to France on an impromptu holiday, where they end up breaking up a crime ring.
• All Animation Is Disney: A non-animated example, due to its similarities to Mary Poppins. Both have Dick Van Dyke in a starring role, two young children as main characters, an English setting, songs written by The Sherman Brothers, and a mostly normal world with fantastical elements thrown in.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: To an extent, the Baron's birthday presents which are actually Caractacus and Truly in disguise. You'd think that this is an example of an egregiously Paper-Thin Disguise... unless you already knew about 18th century clockwork automatons. Of course, they were never able to imitate humans singing, but at the time it seemed like anything was possible with them. There was one that could play the flute, a mechanical duck that could eat and digest food, several that could write, and a chess-playing hoax so ingenious and masterfully crafted that it is still worth mentioning. This last example also demonstrates how it wouldn't have seemed so far-fetched that there might be clockwork creations that could sing and dance (although it was achieved in largely the same way).
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Are the events in the second half of the film a case of All Just a Dream, or did they really happen? Key factors in the second possibility come from the ending where we see Chitty fly over The Pott’s home, as well as Grandpa’s hut still missing in the ground shots, and while it does appear in the flying shots at the end, this could be mitigated to being a flub on the directors part.
    • The portion at the end where we see the family back on the beach could be chalked up to them coming back to that spot to finish their interrupted picnic after dropping off grandpa at the house, but this is just a theory.
  • Did Caractacus add Chitty's flying and floating abilities, or were they part of the "magic" that chitty had? His initial surprise at the car turning into a boat comes across as playful surprise rather than genuine, and later when the car turns into the flying version, Caractacus seems to know that the car could do that based on his subdued reaction to it flying.
• Base-Breaking Character: Pray that Jeremy and Jemima's childish naiveté charms you, otherwise they may come off as cloying.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: For some, the entire second half of the film comes off as this, thanks in no small part to its highly ambiguous All Just a Dream nature.
• Common Knowledge: This film's often mistaken for a Disney production, and sometimes confused with Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • "The eatable, tweetable treat."
  • "Someone to care for, to be there for I have YouTube!"
  • Between Baroness Bomburst's flashy outfits (like the bizarre combo of lingerie, beret, and over-long pigtails during the duet with her husband), blond hair, and over-the-top demeanour, she's like an evil Ruritanian version of Lady Gaga — and a literal Lady in this case!
  • This wouldn't be the last movie musical that had a song praising a Cool Car and which ended with it miraculously flying off at the end.
• Memetic Molester: The Child Catcher is often viewed as one of these by fans of the movie. The lesser-known stage version actually makes him worse, with a Villain Song ("Kiddy-Widdy-Winkies") that many stagings cut for being too suggestive. It probably didn't help that in the original London production in 2002, Richard O'Brien played this role!
• Narm Charm: The film is very much a product of its time, made in an era in the late 60s when movie studios were making a last ditch effort to keep campy movie musicals alive and popular. Not everyone is on board with it (see Sweetness Aversion), but those who are love it specifically because it's so campy and cheerful.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Child Catcher. An androgynous Snape-like creature with a creepy Sinister Schnoz dressed in black who dances about singing the joys of candy and ice cream all as a ploy to lure children into his cart and then lock them in giant circus cages.
  • The book is even worse. In it, Jeremy and Jermina are kidnapped by French criminals, which hits a lot a closer to home.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's Adventures In Tinker Town, an edutainment Point-and-Click Game from the mid 90s. While the game itself has absolutely nothing to do with the movie outside of the general theme of tinkering and mechanics and features none of its characters outside of a sentient Chitty, it's still pretty fun.
• Padding: Even dedicated fans of the movie tend to fast forward through "Lovely Lonely Man," as it's generally agreed to be the weakest song in the whole movie and has no bearing whatsoever on the plot. This is also why it was cut from the stage musical and most TV airings.
• Parody Displacement: Younger viewers may better know two of the tunes from this film by their use on Family Guy: "You Two" became "I've Got James Woods", and "Me Ol' Bamboo" became "A Bag of Weed".
• Poor Man's Substitute: It's really obvious that the role of Truly Scrumptious was meant for Julie Andrews.
• Questionable Casting: Benny Hill as a toymaker? Especially bad since he is basically playing a dramatic role (most of his scenes are somber or tense).
• Retroactive Recognition: An inventor is played by Kenneth Waller, who would later be best known for playing Old Mr. Grace in Are You Being Served? and Grandad in Bread.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The movie is two-and-a-half hours long and the titular car doesn't show up until 50 minutes in. And it's only twenty minutes after that the actual plot (the part that's All Just a Dream) starts. Not surprisingly, it originally ran with an intermission, which some home video releases reinstate.
• Special Effect Failure: Chitty just can't fly without being surrounded by blue matte lines — a dead giveaway that the shots were filmed in front of a blue screen. And then there's the fact that Chitty's normally shiny chrome suddenly stop being reflective when the car is flying. That is, except for those shots of just the hood when it's clearly being airlifted over Neuschwanstein Castle.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Being based off an Ian Fleming story, and made by Albert R. Broccoli and many of the same people involved in the James Bond films, some people consider it a Bond movie of sorts.
• Spiritual Successor: To Mary Poppins, since it stars Dick Van Dyke with music by The Sherman Brothers, and is also set in Edwardian Era England.
• Sweetness Aversion: Part of why the film was not a success in its time and to this day still has a fair amount of detractors. While its fans love its innocent camp, non-fans don't care for the perceived sentimentality of its main characters — the children especially — and "pip pip, cheerio" British attitude. Intentionally subverted with "Chu-Chi Face". The lyrics are sugary sweet, but they're undermined by the Baron repeatedly trying to kill his wife throughout the number. Yet, some kids couldn't even watch the Child Catcher parts because the film suddenly turned so scary.
• Tear Jerker: "Hushaby Mountain", in more ways than one. It's a beautiful lullaby, but its haunting tune and minor key really help the already somber moment. The stage version makes it even more poignant by mentioning that Jemima and Jeremy's Missing Mom always used to sing it to them. Then there's the Dark Reprise: when Caractacus is singing this to the children of Vulgaria, shortly after his own children have been taken from him, he stops in the middle, too hopeless to continue.
• Values Dissonance
  • You just would not have all of those cracks about female drivers in a modern film.
  • One of the inventors being held captive claims that he was a midget before Baron Bomburst put him on the rack. While most would agree that "I was a little person" or "I was a person with dwarfism" wouldn't sound funny, the word "midget" would certainly not be used now that it's considered somewhat derogatory.
• Vindicated by History: Was one of several big-budget Hollywood musicals which flopped upon its release, with diminishing returns and scathing reviews, and helped kill the musical movie genre. In the decades following, it found its audience and became a childhood staple.
• Woolseyism: The German dub changes the lyric about Alexander Graham Bell in "Roses of Success" to one about Wilhelm Röntgen, inventor of the x-ray.

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