Film Theory: Willy Wonka RIGGED the Golden Tickets!

supposing that there were a thousand wonka bars in the world and during the contest you each opened a certain number of them you would have a certain chance of winning that number is a probability everyone understand yes danny tyburn what is the probability that five white kids found wonka's golden tickets excuse me what the golden tickets all five were found by white kids so what is the probability of that happening wonka's an international candy brand after all seems highly unlikely i can't figure that one out but maybe if i research the demographics of 1970s sugar producers and weighed against global distribution maps hold on danny give me 15 minutes i can do this for you the rest of you all just uh play fortnite on your cell phones works every time hello internet welcome to film theory the show that takes you down a world of pure imagination and then ruins all the fun by adding math homework my beloved theorists when i started doing youtube nearly 10 years ago never dreamed that i'd be in the position i'm in today one channel with over 10 million subscribers and still going strong film theory here that's getting really darn close to that exact same milestone you should help us get there by the way by subscribing a channel that was youtube's most popular live stream for a long time now food theory our newest addition to the theist family which if you haven't checked out and subscribed you should i mean you clicked on a video about the math of a fictional candy company why wouldn't you subscribe to a channel where we talk about the math of a real candy company we're already knee-deep in testing a lot of interesting stuff on gummy bears which is yielding some pretty fascinating results for an upcoming episode so that one's coming down the pipeline but then there are also episodes that are already on the channel like how few licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie roll pop or the episode that came out today where we come to the definitive answer on whether a hot dog is actually a sandwich spoiler alert the classification of pizza and chicken wing is also up for debate link is right there on the top of the description or upper right hand corner of the screen please please go check out that channel if you haven't already we've been working really hard over the last year to make this channel happen so please validate our efforts by watching and subscribing thank you but you see that's the whole thing that's incredible here i am beyond grateful to have people watching four channels worth of content at this point but not just watching engaging with all of those channels and you see that's the one i want to talk about right now because if you're the kind of person who pitches theories to me online you might not think that i see them or you might think that i don't care you might think that i'm just gonna sit here and make theories about marvel movies rick and morty and disney until the day my arthritic fingers fall off and while that is true it's also true that i see your ideas and i love those ideas case in point i recently got a tweet from at nia not jax saying quote i want film theory to do a video on the probability that five white kids would get all the golden tickets at matpat gt please this has bothered me for years i gotta say neonate jacks i like your style willy wonka and the chocolate factory is one of my favorite movies of all time if you haven't seen it shame on your parents but as the quick refresher it's a movie about an eccentric candy factory owner willy wonka who creates a contest to give away his factory and plants golden tickets in five random candy bars to select who can come into the factory for a behind the scenes tour and as nia rightly calls out all the kids that find these tickets are well they they look very similar but what are the odds of that sort of thing happening my knee-jerk reaction here is that this has got to be super low right wonka is an international candy distributor but there are so many complicating factors at play from historical era to demography to international trade policies that well the answer is actually far less clear-cut and that means it is plenty ripe for our theory today so strap into your psychedelic theory boat and watch your chins for any errant candy counters cause we're heading on one sweet ride have you ever noticed that by the way i've watched this movie so many times i noticed all the small details the candyman just clocks that girl with the counter it is brutal in order to answer the main question i'm required to address another question that doesn't exactly have itself a straightforward answer what defines a white person did you just feel that it's the icy chill of the internet breathing down my neck watching everything i say from this point forward in the event that i unintentionally say something offensive but stand down pc police i get it racial identity is the kind of thing that gets pretty complicated at both the personal level since a lot of people don't believe a single racial label identifies them correctly but also at the global scale even how often racial data has been used to discriminate race ethnicity and skin tone don't always match up across different cultures or even person-to-person but my interpretation of that nia not jack's tweet leads me to believe that they're using the term white kids to refer to people of primarily european descent who generally have lighter skin tones i'm largely taking that definition from a youtuber named masamon who produces some really interesting videos about the history of ethnicity and demographics around the world so if that's your thing check out his channel it's actually really strong long story short here i recognize that not all people of european descent are white and not all white people are of european descent but in an effort to define our data sets and answer the question as well as possible that's the line that we're gonna have to go with today so getting a calculation for the probability that all five of wonka's golden tickets would go to white people requires two data sets the number of all white people on earth and the total number of all people on earth technically that gives us the probability of one golden ticket going to a white person whoever they are and then we raise that probability to the fifth power since the probabilities of different events are multiplied together to give total probability and before the statistics nerds come after me yes i'm ignoring removal from this calculation technically once the first white person has gotten himself a golden ticket both the population of white people and the population of planet earth decrease by one but since our numbers are already so massive it's not going to affect things all that much so all that being said this should be pretty straightforward right two numbers boom calculate the probability multiply it five times well that's where you'd be wrong you see the math is probably the easiest part first time in the history of ever that's been said that all is just a bunch of simple multiplication no the problem is determining the world population and percentage of white people because that requires us to know when the movie is taking place and that's not entirely clear it's debatable whether it's set at the time that the movie came out around 1971 or sometime after that based on wonka's super advanced technology or heck even a time before that because charlie's village seems well very rural however there is one very small detail that answers the question for us after charlie finds his golden ticket and starts to run home through a construction site for a moment just a moment we can actually see a piece symbol drawn in chalk behind him that symbol was invented as a protest sign for nuclear disarmament in 1958 and didn't become widely popular until the late 1960s so it is safe to say that the movie is set in the present day by which i mean the present at the time which is now the past for us it's around 1970. all right according to statistics compiled by the united nations the world population in 1970 was about 3.632 billion people less than half of what it is now 50 years later by the way the total white population is a little bit harder to calculate because a lot of countries didn't ask about ethnicity on their census at the time many countries still don't to this day however demographers have estimated the percentage of the world's population that's been white throughout history giving us approximations of just over 30 percent of the world in 1950 and just over 20 percent in the year 2000 assuming that general trend is correct the world's population would have been 26.464 percent or a little over one in four back in the 1970s if we raise those odds to the fifth power we get ourselves the odds of all five golden tickets going to white kids at a minuscule .13 chance for a little perspective the white kids sweeping the golden tickets is about 1 in 800 whereas your chances of catching a foul ball at a professional baseball game are about one in a thousand sure those odds aren't great but unlikely things do tend to happen a lot a lot of fly balls and golden tickets out there in the heat so case closed episode over time to hop over to food theory and check out the new episode over there nope we are just getting started because the calculation we just made makes a few key assumptions the first of which is that everyone on the planet has access to wonka bars and that's just not very realistic a better calculation would consider which markets wonka products would have likely been excluded from in the 1970s and to do that we need to answer one important question where the heck is this movie supposed to take place charlie and his family and willy wonka all sound american you can move in immediately and me absolutely what happens to the whole family but then random townspeople and charlie's teacher all have themselves british accents a test we take each friday on what we learn during the week will now take place on monday before we've learned it plus when we see the town from above it looks like a quaint little village from the middle of germany growing up i always assumed that the movie took place somewhere in europe despite most of the main characters speaking with american accents but the movie actually gives us the answer via the newscasts well we in america slept right here in america so strange as it might seem this movie is set in the u.s you could be stubborn and say that they're watching american news broadcasts from a foreign country but we actually see an international broadcast from paraguay when the south american news covers the fake fifth winner and we can clearly see that the television refers to it as a satellite broadcast so yes it is a weird heavily european influenced version of the us but we are apparently somewhere in the good old u.s of a the movie makes wonka products seem like one of the biggest food brands in the world so the question now becomes how widespread would the distribution be for a major us-based international food business back in the 1970s sorry this is just one of those moments do you see how stupidly over-researched this all is how deep we go about questions literally no one cares about oh sure let's research the global distribution map of 1970s era us-based food stuff companies to determine why wonka so white i mean these are without exaggeration some of my favorite episodes but it's moments like these where the rabbit hole has gotten so deep and the research is just such an obscurely specific topic that i just really appreciate doing this channel if you like these sorts of episodes too please subscribe if you haven't already to film theory i really really want this channel to hit 10 million subscribers and would really appreciate your help getting there this channel works really hard and it really deserves it so please if you could help that would be amazing we can't use the real life wonka candy brand in this case because that was only a really solid product integration launched in time for the movie so it doesn't really have that much history to go back on no if we're looking for the most accurate business to compare 1970s wonka to it's the world's most famous source of excess sugar coca-cola based in atlanta georgia coca-cola has been available in different parts of the world for over a hundred years and in 1970 coke had the ability to stretch across the planet just like you see with wonka candy in the movie so that's why i chose it as our wonka stand-in as opposed to say another candy company like hershey which had themselves smaller international distribution back in the 70s so that being said and this one's important for our calculation there were a lot of places that you couldn't get coke in the 1970s the first major market the soviet union and for fairly obvious reasons we had a war it was a really cold war we almost blew each other up with nukes several times and then we didn't yay history fanta a coca-cola product came to russia in 1979 and coke a few years after that which is still too late for our calculations market number two that's excluded china interestingly enough coca-cola was first sold in china in 1927 but after mao's communist revolution in 1949 coca-cola and a whole lot of other western products were outlawed in the country and coke couldn't come back into china until 1979 and finally market number three the arab league nations the arab league which consists of mainly western asian and north african countries like egypt iraq and saudi arabia weren't too pleased when coca-cola opened up to israel in 1966 and they levied a boycott against the soda until 1979. so for our calculations we'll be deleting the 1970 populations of china the ussr and the arab league nations from our world population totals reducing it all by 1.1 billion people it also reduces our total white population by about 228 million at 733 million divided by 2.457 billion raised to the fifth power we get ourselves the new grand total of wonka so white at point two four percent that is the chance of all five golden tickets going to white people once you eliminate all the places that wonka candy bars probably wouldn't be it's um twice as likely as our first calculation but it is still a 1 in 400 long shot it really just seems like there's this astronomically small chance that the golden tickets would shake out this way right well when i ask a question that way you know i'm misleading you you you do know that right i've only been doing that for eight plus years because there's one more factor for us to consider and it's probably the most important one of the bunch sure we've gotten ourselves an idea of how many people had access to wonka bars back in the 1970s but we have to account for how many bars those people are going to buy in various parts of the world because let's face it some people are gonna buy very very few if any bars and some little monsters are gonna buy a lot of bars it's all about disposable income and relative wealth we hear that virus assault for instance blitzes through 760 000. sweetheart i can't push them no harder 19 000 bars an hour they're shelling now obviously she is an extreme outlier still the scene in charlie's math class shows us that his peers were typically buying a lot of wonka bars as well you peter golf how many did you open 150 charlie bucket how many did you open two 200 100 200 just two as we can see from charlie's british for no apparent reason teacher it's not just commonplace for these kids to buy wonka bars by the hundreds it's expected but not every country in the world has the same disposable income that the u.s had in the 1970s for instance india had more than twice as many people as the united states but the us's per capita income was 45 times what india's was so if they're buying candy at a rate consistent with their earnings it's actually a lot more likely that a golden ticket would show up in the us rather than india so by combining per capita income data from 1970 with populations by region of the world in the same year we can adjust the probability to account for purchase power the regions with predominantly white populations also had themselves very high regional wealth multipliers north america was 44 western europe 24 australia new zealand 23.5 in contrast the multipliers for the developing world show just how relatively poor they were in 1970 africa's multiplier 2.7 south asia 1.8 latin america 5.3 so throwing in all of these new considerations into our calculations suddenly the chances for any one golden ticket going to a white person jump from our initial calculation of about one and four to now more than three and four it triples which means that our final final estimate for the probability that all five golden tickets go to white kids is drum roll please what do you mean we don't have a drum roll effect we've done this bit before we have it in our fine fine don't look for it then just give me some dramatic sound effect you've got mail really 24 even if we want to adjust that number and assume that all of the predominantly white regions had the same percentage of white population as the usa which was 87.7 percent likely much lower than in northern and western europe the final odds still come out to over 12 so when we consider things like excluded markets and relative wealth it's still not super likely that all five golden tickets would go to white kids but it is much much likelier than it might initially seem now somewhere between 12 and 24 ain't great odds but it's far from evidence that the system was rigged you know what is evidence that the system was rigged slugworth how is it possible that he could get from charlie's hometown somewhere in the u.s to the precise locations in germany and england and across the us before the winners even had time to do a television interview of course we find out at the end of the movie that slugworth has been working with wonka the whole time so if slugworth knows where to go that means wonka knows where to send him and he knew where the golden tickets were going they probably even set up charlie he buys his golden ticket with a dollar he finds in a storm drain and then just so happens to run into slugworth between the candy store and his house charlie hasn't been on the news yet so how does slugworth know that he's got the last golden ticket because he planted the money and he planted the bar with the golden ticket in it he may have even gotten the candyman in on it since charlie doesn't even pick out the chocolate that had the ticket in it you ever noticed that one the candyman just picks it off the shelf and hands it to charlie slugworth probably even gave him the instructions hand it to a kid that's worthy why not try a regular wonka bar this time and you see that's the last nail in the coffin here what's interesting isn't the fact that all the winners are white it's the fact that they're all kids because as we see throughout the movie adults are buying these candy bars by the millions because they have the expendable income and yet somehow against all probability the winners are five children it's because wonka through slugworth rigged it so kids got the tickets he needed the five winners to be kids who also just so happen to be white it's something he admits to in the final scene i can't go on forever so who can i trust to run the factory when i leave not a grown-up that's why i decided a long time ago that i had to find a child and that's why you sent out the golden tickets that's right so what are the odds that all five golden tickets go to white kids at neon jacks based on pure probability one in eight hundred based on a bit more research one in four but the real probability is one in one because the whole thing was rigged from the start but hey that's just a theory a film theory and just a reminder to go and check out food theory if you liked this episode which let's face it you got to the very end of it you did then it's important for you to know that a lot of the research that we got for this one was stuff we learned while doing work over on food theory so go check it out there are a lot of fun episodes on the way including how to break the colonel sanders curse the dark truth behind count chocula and beating the chipotle menu so please if you haven't yet give today's new episode of food theory a watch and give that channel a subscribe links are on screen right now and i'll see you across all the channels next week

Channel: undefined

Views: 4,159,064

Rating: 4.9077396 out of 5

Keywords: willy wonka, willy wonka and the chocolate factory, charlie and the chocolate factory, golden ticket, golden tickets, gene wilder, charlie, oompa loompa, roald Dahl, chocolate factory, disaster, flop, candy, chocolate, scam, Exposed, uncovered, film theory, film theorists, matpat, film theory willy wonka, matpat willy wonka, film theory golden ticket, matpat golden ticket, it's a trap, oompa loompa song

Id: MzP9QOUdpQ4

Length: 19min 1sec (1141 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020

Reddit Comments

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[u/Togo34]

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