[poignant music playing] The show's scale is close to being unmatched. The factory, it is 40,000 square feet. It is a massive space. Unlike anything that I believe has ever been done before. A lot of the bigger challenge shows are shot outdoors because it's easier, but we've created an entire 360-degree immersive world that it's so real that you can almost taste and smell it. The premise of the show is really quite simple. We wanted to bring Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory to a new generation, and we wanted the Golden Ticket to mean something again.
[crowd cheering] We've got pairs of contestants coming in, just like the original. Who all bring a family member or a loved one to the tour.
[woman] Oh my God, JoAnne! I got a Golden Ticket!
[shouts joyfully] Cash prize is enormous. $100,000 for 30 years.
[gasping]
[woman] What?!
I could retire. It is a social experiment wrapped up in a lot of wonderment.
[Emer] It's unlike every other competition series. We always came back to what happens when people live in the most magical place on earth, and what are our contestants made of? They're gonna have to endure incredible tests.
[dramatic music builds]
[contestants cheering] They're gonna have to live within the walls of it. You could be having your dreams come true and then instantly be terminated from the competition.
[buzzer blares]
[man 1] Team Raspberry!
Oh my…
[man 2] That's super messed up. And that absolutely mirrors Roald Dahl's books and the film itself.
[whimsical flute melody playing]
[poignant music playing]
[Rusty Goffe] I was an original Oompa Loompa in the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. To be back here making Wonka The Golden Ticket with my son, Ben, is absolutely mind-blowing.
I don't think you ever believed you would be back in orange face and green hair, did you?
[Rusty] Never in a million years. But now, second time round, that just seems so much better.
[whimsical music playing]
[Rich] The Oompa Loompas, for us, they're not just little people, but they're also big people and male and female. And so it's very diverse. All the wardrobe and the hair is very much a nod to the original.
[laughing, exclaiming] The Oompas are the silent workers in the factory. My role as an Oompa Loompa, I help the contestants through a maze of tasks.
[Ben] We go into the house, we deliver them into the chocolate room, we drive the Wonkatania boat, we take them into the challenges, we stand by, and then, occasionally, we do get to terminate them as well.
[buzzer blares]
[latch clicks]
[dramatic music playing]
[man] We started talking about the Chocolate Factory, which is the main hero of the show. We wanted this set to have the bones and the DNA of the 1970s factory that we all know and love. So when you walk in here, you recognize it and you feel at home.
[man] The doors are opening!
[contestants gasp] Oh!
[man 1] My God. Wow.
[man 2] Oh my God. The question was always, "What would Wonka do?" The chocolate we have is made so it is ingestible. It does look exactly like chocolate, like its viscosity, its color. It was made in California and shipped here to Australia. That took a fair bit of R&D to get that right. Look, it's a chocolate river!
[women laughing] You look around and you can see, you know, all the mushrooms. That is the nod to the Gene Wilder movie. It's the detail that is always the thing that makes it right. So you come through, and all the different flowers and the plants…
What have you found?
That's edible grass. Props to moving cogs to machines that work.
[steam whistle blows]
[man] This looks insane. This is a massive team that has brought this vision to life.
[man] Ooh. We're so proud of what we've created.
[Willy Wonka] Guests, sit back and savor the chaos.
[mysterious music playing] I really connect with Wonka as he's a self-made person. He broke the rules, and he created a world where anything can happen.
[contestants cheering]
And it does. We've got, uh, the forced perspective room. This was our first big illusion.
[man 1] All right, man. Ready for this?
[man 2] Whoa.
[Adam] Coming on board to develop these illusions… Which I'd never done before. I'd never built them in this way that would have untrained general members of the public instantly disappear. Behind the scenes, I had a team of five people, and each one of them had a very specific job that they needed to pull off. But it meant that a person instantly vanished from the space without a trace.
[loud whooshing] We didn't know who was gonna vanish. We genuinely didn't know who was gonna take the golden gumball. Where'd you go? [chuckles]
[keyboard clacking]
[female voice] WonkaVision generator initiated.
Going live in three, two…
[machinery powering up]
[mysterious music continues] The WonkaVision set was uniquely difficult to pull off. Because we are beaming people into the television set.
[Rich] They go into what's called our fade box. You see sort of almost like a laser screen go… [imitates whirring]
[contestants exclaiming]
[machinery whirring] And once it closes, you can see everyone disappear behind the box.
[machinery powering up]
[woman] Wait, what?
[contestants exclaiming]
[man] Are we in the TV? In some of the games, we got to use a really interesting piece of technology where we could take a host who was thousands of miles away and put them right there on the set with our contestants. So it allowed us to get some bigger, promotable names on the show that might not have been here otherwise. It seemed to fit perfectly within the world of Wonka.
[host] Look at this place, right?
[woman] This is really cool. Look at all the light bulbs. Very expensive. All of the illusions and all of the special effects, all of them relied on being real and working as live. Because this is a reality show, there's no green screen here.
It's for real.
I got goosebumps thinking about it.
[Chris] This show is a designer's dream…
[exciting music playing] …and just a lot of fun to do. It's full of wonder. It's full of magic. It's perfect. My hope is that audiences will be as excited watching this as we were filming it. To Wonka! You are going to love it.
[scanner chimes]
[crowd cheering]
[cork pops]
[all] Whoo!
[music fades]
It's a club. We could form a club.
It's a club. Yes.
Sell tickets.
[laughs]
Is it getting hot in here?
New season. New connections. New England.