Film Theory: Willy Wonka Gave Charlie His Golden Ticket ON PURPOSE

In Willy Wonka’s great Golden Ticket contest, we’re led to believe that every winner is chosen completely at random. Why else would such awful children be rewarded with the possibility of free chocolate for life? Surely, he would have chosen worthy candidates?

Well, what if he did just that. What if Wonka chose ONE worthy candidate with the express intention of giving him his Chocolate Factory? What if that candidate was young Charlie Bucket, the most wholesome hero in movie history?

First, we need to work out how he could do that.

3. Wonka Chooses All Of His Candidates

There’s some suggestion that Wonka engineers the entire situation and hand-picks ALL of the winning children and it’s hard to argue with that fact.

The easiest way to prove it is to look at Slugworth - a character expanded for the 1971 movie but who exists as a rival who sent spies into the Factory in the book. In all four of the Golden Ticket winners’ cases Slugworth - who is in fact a man working for Wonka - turns up just when the tickets are found or shortly afterwards. In the case of Verruca Salt, he’s already in the factory before the ticket is found and announced, which definitely suggests it was planted there.

The reason Wonka chooses his “victims” as people have come to consider them is that all four represent the antithesis of what he wants from his successor as the Factory owner. They’re greedy and impulsive, disrespectful, arrogant and mean-spirited. And crucially, they’re all also the opposite of Charlie, because of their privileged backgrounds and their abuse of that privilege.

It seems likely that Wonka uses Slugworth to plant tickets so that these repulsive children are chosen and he can use them as a means to double-check that Charlie is the right candidate. They are his “bad nuts” intended as part of the weird interview process.

But that doesn’t explain how he gets a ticket to Charlie. As with the others, he uses a mole…