Today, we're answering one of cartoon's longest-standing questions:
Just how much money does Scrooge McDuck have in his money bin?
But first, there's something I've wanted to do since I was like age 7, taking a page out of your book buddy. Let's do this!
*Crash*
*Another Crash*
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Hello internet, welcome to.. you get it by now.
And man, if you were a child of the 90s, hearing that theme song gives you the nostalgia tingles.
DuckTales was then, and still is, great..
I mean, it created the childhood fantasy of swimming through a literal pool of gold coins,
which, now that I've done it, it's still awesome, but..
Whoooeey, is it a workout..
Old FatPat here didn't know what hit him.
*Chatter*
Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with the show, DuckTales stars Donald Duck's uncle, Scrooge McDuck.
"Scrooge McDuck? The Bajillionaire?"
The .0001% of one-percenters.
With a skyscraper literally filled with gold that overlooks his city of Duckburg.
You know you're rich when a tax for the wealthy is named after you.
That's right, the Dutch word of the year in 2014
was "Dagobertducktaks", actual legislation named after Dagobert Duck, the Dutch name for Scrooge McDuck
But it wasn't always that way.
Scrooge is a testament to the value of hard work,
starting as a poor shoeshine who got sick of being taken advantage of by heartless customers,
insisting that the only valid way to acquire wealth is to earn it square, and avows that
Scrooge McDuck's word is as good as gold. And that grit and determination paid off, making him
officially one of - if not the - richest cartoon character ever created.
According to countless online lists - including Forbes, (The business magazine) - he started from the bottom, and now he's here.
So he is - quite literally - Drake, or more accurately *a* drake, since "drake" is the name for a male duck.
Alright, but let's get real. Although everyone knows scrooge is ENORMOUSLY wealthy, the actual sum of money
he has is really unclear. According to the
1956 comic, "The Second Richest Duck," Scrooge is worth "one multiplujillion nine obsquatumatillion, six hundred and twenty-three dollars and sixty-two cents"
a number that gets updated in the 12 comic series, "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck"
to "five multiplujillion, nine impossibidillion, seven fantasticatrillion dollars and sixteen cents!"
Then, if those numbers weren't
ridiculous enough for you, in season 2 episode 6 of the original Ducktales TV series, the episode "Liquid Assets,"
Fenton Crackshell, Scrooge's accountant, says that the McDuck money bin contains: *there needs to be a drumroll*
"Six hundred septillion three hundred eighty sextillion nine hundred forty-seven trillion five hundred twenty-two billion dollars & 35 cents!"
35!?
Whoops, 36.
Uh, excuse me Fenton. I just said he had FIVE multiplujillion
Are you telling me that he lost three hundred and twenty three fentillion(?) dollars overnight?
Come on! I think someone here forgot to carry a "one". But all joking aside,
Obviously none of these are actually answering our question:
How fat are Scrooge's stacks in *real* terms?
Multiple outlets have tried to calculate his worth, they just don't do that good of a job with it.
For instance, Forbes Magazine and that richest fictional character list estimated Scrooge's earnings in
2007 to be $28.8 Billion dollars, then bumped it up to
$44.1 billion dollars in 2011 due to the rise in Gold prices
But they never actually say where they got those sorts of numbers. At the website "The Billfold" uses cool
equations but misses out on just how deep
Scrooge's money bin is. So, with a reboot of the series come to Disney XD on August 12th, one that all Disney XD's
sponsorship of this episode aside,
legitimately looks great; seems to stay true to the spirit of the original
series and has a very cool comic aesthetic so as someone who grew up on these cartoons
I hope it does really well, check it out if you're interested;
and the question still at large after all of these years it is time to put my
theorist hat into the ring and answer the age-old question:
Just how much money does Scrooge McDuck have in that famous money bin of his?
Now, Obviously with the Disney XD series coming out I wanted to start there.
Unfortunately, because it's not out yet footage right now is limited to the trailer the opening theme song and a couple of spare teasers
So, I'm not really able to get a good sense of the dimensions inside the bin.
But that doesn't mean we're out of luck. Not only do we get a good general sense of the size and shape of the bin from
the outside, looking very similar to the design from the original TV series. The trailer gives us our first
major clue, and I do mean major.
"I run a multi-trillion dollar business". This is according to my research the first time the series has put a real world
number to Scrooge's wealth putting it in the trillions, but when it comes to money
that's a huge number. Over 20 times the highest estimates Forbes gave him. So today, we won't just be testing out
how much money he has,
but also how well this new reboot knows dear old Scroogey. Usually when I'm writing these theories,
I need to scrape around for whatever information
I can find. This theory actually has the opposite problem. For the first time the history of these shows,
there's too much information. The statistics you see about the money
bin are constantly changing in both the comics and the original series
For instance in the very first panel of the comic "Only a poor man",
We see a depth gauge in the money bin that reads the building is
79 feet (24 metre) Deep with coins and bills. Not a shabby place to start. In another comic the pixelated parrot we get a ton of
information, or more accurately:
90 tons of it. Since that supposedly how much cashola Scrooge is keeping in the bin. And earlier in that same comic we see
him counting his money again confirming he has 9 billion trillion and
2 $1,000 dollar bills stored in his vault. We even get in yet, another
comic that he has 3 cubic acres of money. Obviously a joke, since an acre is a measure of area and not
volume. If you did indeed have a cubic ACRE3 you would have created a 4 dimensional space,
a 3 dimensional space existing in a specific time frame.
At that point, screw
how much money he has, the size of his wealth would seriously be ripping through the laws of the universe. There are even
blueprints of the money bin. In the
2001 comic, "the Beagle boys versus the money bin", we learned that the vault is actually a 13-story building that's
127-feet (38 meters) tall with a large central chamber reserved for the coins. That would be great information
But the cube design is completely different from what I'm most interested in:
The TV shows' bin. Both in the original series, as well as the reboot, which we can see is taller and more narrow.
So it's so much conflicting information. What do we do? Well the way I see it
We go to the most reliable source on the matter: Episode
15 of Season 1 of the original Ducktales TV show "The Money Vanishes" in it,
we see the criminal family, *The Beagle Boys*, trick Scrooge into dousing his money with a teleportation spray. It's a plan that's so successful
They're able to clear the vault of all its money leaving Scrooge
penniless at the bottom, 20 minutes and 40 seconds into that episode we get the clearest shot of the complete
volume of the money vault that we ever get across the entirety of the series, and even better
Scrooge's in it.
So if we're able to identify his canon height
We'll be able to get a sense of scale to this entire scene
No weird exterior shots, no guessing about the accuracy of offhanded remarks, just
one scene that shows us the complete inside of the vault and gives us the means to measure it, a theorist's dream!
So question one: how tall is scrooge? Thankfully this has an official answer, but you got to dig deep for it. In the
1963 comic "For Old Dime's Sake" we see villainous Magica De Spell
put scrooge to sleep and then measure him so she can assume his identity, and sneak into the vault. According to that panel
he's just about three feet tall or point nine one meters, now to translate that information to the money
bin. We see in the blueprints for the money bin that the ladder that leads to the bottom is officially canon
So, if we know the height of the ladder we can get an accurate read of the entire
building. In that scene from "The Money Vanishes" between counting the rungs you can see and estimating the ones that are either
just slightly off screen or aren't clearly defined near the top of the animation, you get about 30 rungs total on the ladder
But how far apart are those rungs? To figure that out
we have to go back to the very first episode. In that episode
We see scrooge
using the ladder to pull himself out of the bin, with each rung gap about a third of his height, with scrooge being three feet
tall, that means each rung is about one foot apart, and the ladder as a whole being just about thirty feet tall. That...
Seems low to me
So let's double check using some of that other information we have, in the very opening seconds of the very first episode of Ducktales
We see the actual depth gauge to the vault and it shows:
70 deep? Seeing this I was heartbroken, but then I realized
70 what? Feet? It can't be, because we see scrooge in the background. If we were to measure his size
relative to that depth gauge, he'd be 20 feet tall. What is he Wario? And remember
that's with scrooge further back in the shot
So perspective wise, he's even smaller relative to the depth gauge than he normally would be, and if Three-foot-tall-Scrooge
is 20 markings on the depth gauge, that means seventy markings is only
about ten feet deep of gold! Even less than before!
So it would appear consistent scaling in this world is going to have more issues than team vogue!
That's a magazine with a lot of issues just so you know, it was meant to be funny,
but no the cringy puns are just too real you guys. So we have a little bit of a dilemma here
we have a lot of conflicting informations, and I want to go big for today's theory.
I mean Disney XD paid me to do this episode and as you all have heard on this show, time and time again they never
invite me to cool premieres or anything.
So this is my chance to really impress them, love me Disney XD! LOVE ME! *NeedyPat Confirmed*
So to be super thorough, and earn Disney's undying awe at the lengths that we go to on this show.
I'm gonna power through every conceivable
calculation I can, to see the range of money that Scrooge McDuck
might be hiding in this thing... Cue the clock! Method number one - Depth gauge: using the depth gauge ruler
we can photoshop that gauge out of its pile, scale it appropriately, then use a few different angles to figure out the rest of the
dimensions of the bin. Knowing that 20 marks on the gauge equals about three real feet, we get a money pile
that's ten feet deep, 20 feet wide, and twenty-one feet long. That's
4,200 cubic feet of coinage.
Method number two -The ladder method: Knowing Scrooge is three feet tall, we can calculate the entry to the vault as a circle with a diameter of about eight
feet. That allows us to measure out the walls which become 20 and 32 feet respectively, couple those numbers with the pile
that's 30 feet of gold and we get a stack of cash that's
19200 Cubic feet. Method number three - Blueprints:
Since scrooge is always diving into his money
We know the actual depth of the coin stack is about nine floors and a basement level and with the whole building being twelve floors
above ground and
127 feet tall from ground level
Each floor is going to be about ten feet, ten feet times ten levels equals about 100 foot tall mound of money. Looking
deeper at the blueprints,
we can see the width of the bin is just under 120 feet and the length of the bin is
120 feet minus 30 feet for the office rooms making it 90 feet wide
discounting two feet on each side for the thickness of the walls you get dimensions of 86 by 116 by 100 or
997 thousand six hundred cubic feet. Method number four - Three Cubic Acres: Even though it's a completely made-up number we can try to extrapolate meaning
out of scrooge saying that he has three cubic acres of money. An acre is
43,560 Square
Feet, meaning that if we assume each side of this cube of money is one acre in area, the side length is going to be
about two hundred eight point seven feet cube, it and you get a volume of nine million ninety
thousand nine hundred seventy two cubic feet. So at three cubic acre Scrooge's money bin would have contained
27 million two hundred seventy two thousand nine hundred sixteen cubic feet in size! This number will be
really fun when we do the final total. Shiver my shekels that is a ton of gold. Do you love me yet Disney?
Well don't answer just yet because this gamer truly does have a guide to everything. That's another show on
Disney XD by the way and true to that title we're going even deeper down this rabbit hole because what we've just
calculated is the volume of space in the vault across all the different scales
we have, but that would imply a solid block of money down there, and that's not precise enough. This is a bunch of coins,
randomly stacked coins and as my self witnessed when hopping into the Ducktales vault for myself
There's a lot of air between those coins, so in my attempt to really impress you Disney
I went and read a bunch of papers with really boring sounding names until I found the one!
From Princeton a paper with... I gotta admit my favorite title of all time: "Some
Observations on the Random Packing of Hard Ellipsoids" watch out George R. R.
This is some page turning stuff! In this paper
we learn or more accurately I learn and tell you to spare you the pain of having to read this thing, that the packing efficiency
of coins in a random pile is about 57%.
Meaning that almost half that giant money pile is going to be nothing
but air. That leaves our gold volume totals at... just flash it up on screen
No one needs to hear me list off all the stuff do we get to the final numbers
But you know what we are still not done
This is the volume of the pile
calculated in cubic feet, to find the
value of this pile of gold we need to know the weight of all of it since gold prices are usually
listed per unit of weight, so gold is really dense thereby making it really heavy at
1206 pounds for a cubic foot
So I went ahead and calculated out the weights and pounds for all four of our methods which you see listed out on screen right now
*Maniacal laugh*
*CrazyPat has been unleashed!*
and at this point
we should totally be done right? multiply it by the price of gold, wrap this
episode up, earn Disney's love and respect for my super nerd dumb forever.
Booyah! I'm walking the Red Carpet at the next Marvel movie Premiere, because Disney XD is so grateful
at how I was able to solve their Scrooge McDuck
problem... Except here's the catch!
These are "Avoirdupois Pounds" the very long and very french name
Americans use every day when we talk about how heavy something
is. They're the pounds that plague ol' FatPat every time he steps on a scale.
It's the system where sixteen ounces equals a pound,
but silver gold platinum and other precious metals that have lent their names to Pokemon
Installments are valued based on the "Troy Weight System". It's
completely different, when comparing the two systems: A troy ounce is heavier than Avoirdupois ounce.
About 10% more, but here's where all these science and mathematicians who created these systems go overboard?
dumb. While a Troy ounce is heavier than an Avoirdupois ounce
One Troy pound
weighs less than one Avoirdupois pound, because one Troy pound is defined as having 12 ounces, not the usual
16 in the other system. I'm just I'm just done
*The Return of CrazyPat*
Nothing about this show is ever easy
*Life isn't easy either :/*
Hear that sound? It is me! Repeatedly! Banging! My! Head!
Against! The desk! So to put all of this insanity to bed
I converted all four of our numbers to Avoirdupois ounces, then to Troy ounces. It's worth noting that according to method 3 if the vaults'
blueprints are to be believed, Scrooge's vault would contain twice the amount of gold that exists in the entire
world. Oh and that cubic acre? Yeah,
that's 55 thousand times the amount of gold on Planet Earth! No wonder Scrooge
has to the moon in the video games and in the opening credits sequence of the original series!
And lastly! With the price of gold currently at one thousand two hundred and forty three dollars and 30 cents per Troy ounce. I was finally,
finally able to calculate how much gold Scrooge has! Cue the drum roll!
*lackluster drum roll*
Are you kidding me? Let's step it up. We're trying to Impress Disney XD here.
*mediocre drum roll*
Fine! That'll do, so if we went with method one, the most conservative route, where he only has ten feet of gold per depth gauge
calculations the money bin would be filled with fifty two
billion three hundred forty eight million four hundred ninety three thousand seven hundred sixty seven dollars and fifty cents
That is the lowest possible estimate of scrooge's wealth and would still put him as the fifth richest person on Planet
Earth just behind the creator of Facebook mark Zuckerberg.
Method two - The ladder method: where we saw scrooge's wealth teleported away
Well that was good payday for the Beagle Boys as they would have wound up with the greatest heist in history
walking away with over two hundred and thirty nine billion
dollars allowing Scrooge McDuck to surge past the richest person in the world Bill Gates and his
measly 86 billion, but from here on out the numbers get crazy! Method three based on the dimensions of the comics'
blueprints of the bin, Scrooge would no longer be a billionaire
he'd be in the trillions! At twelve trillion four hundred thirty four billion
Thirteen million five hundred fifty two thousand four hundred ninety dollars
And ten cents if you include his number one dime that puts him not only past the richest people in the world
but also the richest companies in
the world! Don't get jelly Disney you created him. And lastly, method number four, if he truly had three
cubic acres of gold a preposterous
statement, It'd yield the equally preposterous
grand total of three hundred thirty three trillion nine hundred twenty seven billion six hundred thirty three million eight hundred sixty-three
thousand five hundred twenty seven dollars and ten cents. Get this, that's more money than there is in the entire
world! If you've added together all the banknotes, coins, and money
deposited in savings and checking accounts across the planet Earth the total is around eighty point nine trillion dollars.
Scrooge has four times that amount and remember this is all just his gold coins
That's not including any jewels gems paper money and real estate
he owns outside of that bin and here's the craziest thing. The new reboot nailed it!
I was a bit skeptical when the trailer said I run a multitrillion-dollar business
But there you go they were right on the whole time. So there you have it once and for all the final answer Scrooge McDuck
trillionaire the Hands-down
richest fictional character ever! Not bad for a duck who started as a
shoeshine and with this reboot coming to Disney XD starting with a big launch event Saturday August
12 you can and should watch along with me, as Scrooge's wealth only continues to get bigger!
But hey, that's just a theory, A FILM THEORY!!!
aaaaaaaaaaaaaand cut
Good theory!
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for your own good!