Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party is an annual event that takes place at the Magic
Kingdom every September and October.
As the name implies, it’s a Halloween party that’s, well, not so scary.
One of the selling points of the event is that you can go around the Magic Kingdom and
trick-or-treat.
Now like the Christmas party or after hours events, Not So Scary is a paid ticketed event
meaning you have to pay separately to go.
It got me thinking: How much candy would you need to collect while trick-or-treating to
essentially pay for the ticket to Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party?
So the answer actually changes depending on what kind of ticket you purchase, but the
short answer is that it most likely wouldn’t be possible to pull off in most cases save for one.
When you get to the party, you’re given a free bag for trick-or-treating.
Doesn’t matter if you’re an adult or a child, in costume or not.
For the purposes of this video that’s the bag I used.
On a few occasions I collected one single bags worth of candy, brought it home, and weighed it.
I also timed how long it took to fill that bag.
The average weight of one bag of candy came out to 48.3 ounces, or a little over 3 pounds,
or 1.36 kilograms.
Because I love spreadsheets and this is all totally in the name of science or YouTube
or whatever, I also recorded the breakdown of what kinds of candy you get and how much.
The event is partnered with Mars, so it’s a lot of Skittles, Starbursts, M&Ms, Snickers,
Milky Ways and that kind of stuff.
In terms of timing, I wasn’t really rushing from spot to spot, but I also wasn’t stopping
to do anything else.
I just continued from one trick-or-treat location to the next.
It ended up taking about one hour to get to the 14 trick or treat spots and to fill one
single bag.
I ended up on some lines that were virtually empty and I coasted through, and some that
were packed and had a bit of a wait.
OK. So we know that roughly every hour you can collect around 48 ounces of candy.
What does that mean for getting your money’s worth out of the ticket?
Well to make the comparison I did some online shopping.
There was no one option that perfectly matched the candy selection at the party, but I settled on this.
It’s a variety bag with a lot of the candy brands from Not So Scary.
It costs $24.99 and will get you 127.7 ounces or 3.6 kilograms of candy.
That comes out to twenty cents per ounce.
Next we have to look at the different types of tickets for the event.
You see, the prices vary depending on when you go.
There’s also the Halloween ticket, which costs extra.
So here are the breakdowns for each type of ticket, and how much candy you’d need.
Tickets in August and September for an adult ran for $85 and got you access to one night
of the party.
That $85 would otherwise get you three variety bags of candy, or 383.1 ounces.
At an average of 48.3 ounces per bag, that means you’d need to collect just about eight
bags of candy during the Not So Scary Party.
At one hour per bag, that would take eight hours which isn’t possible as the party
itself and the trick or treating within it only runs from 7pm to midnight.
Now that we’re in October the tickets run from $105 to $115 for adults depending on
which day of the week you go.
With that increased price you’d need to collect ten and a half bags.
Now if you decide to go on Halloween night, the adult tickets are $135.
That throws an extra variety bag into the mix and once again ups the number of trick-or-treat
bags needed to just over 13.
I mean, maybe with the August ticket you could have rushed from spot to spot and leaped over children
or worked a smaller loop of trick or treat spots and possibly have gotten those extra three bags, but I
just can’t imagine a single person collecting 13 bags of candy in one night.
You obviously could get more candy with more people in your party, but that also means
more tickets you’d need to buy so that defeats the point.
There is however one way to make this work.
This year Disney introduced for the first time a season pass for Mickey’s Not-So-Scary
Halloween Party.
For $300 a guest is able to attend every single night of the event with the exception of Halloween night.
With the recently added event nights, that’s 35 trips.
Now that $300 can buy you twelve variety bags of candy, totalling 1532.4 ounces, or 95.7
pounds, or 43.4 kilograms of candy.
That is a child-sized candy haul.
Rounded up, because why not, that would require you collecting 32 bags of candy from the party.
Now in one night that would simply be impossible, but with the season pass you don’t have
one night.
You have 35 nights.
That means you could casually collect one bag per night for 32 of the nights, and then
take three nights off.
Or if you don’t want to go to the party that many times you can just dedicate seven
nights to just trick or treating and get all the candy.
By the way, using my breakdown from earlier, that haul would come out to over 500 packs
of Skittles, 544 Starbursts, nearly 300 of those little Snickers that are somehow smaller than fun sized
Snickers, nearly 300 packs of M&Ms, and enough of those Lifesaver Big Ring Gummies to fill a garbage bag,
because what else are you going to do with them? They're gross.
So I suppose in most cases the reality is that you likely won’t be able to get your
ticket’s worth in candy alone.
Of course this is just a nonsense video and you shouldn’t really try to begin with.
After all, there’s so much more to Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party.
The parade.
The stage show.
The fireworks.
The somewhat shorter lines.
Not to mention seeing all of the fun and creative costumes that guests show up in.
Now to figure out what the dentist bill looks like after 95 pounds of candy.