Gamblin' Goblin Costume

Every year, my son comes up with some crazy idea for his Halloween costume, like a pufferfish, or the State of Delaware. It’s like he’s daring me to see if I can really do it. The only difference this year was that the idea came from a friend who suggested he be a slot machine! He wanted it to cost a candy to play, and dispense a candy jackpot to winners. It was easily the most challenging costume he's wanted so far because although I am very creative, I am not an engineer! We spent some time looking on line and found this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVAbWXqmjRM which provided the basic instructions I used, though I doubled the size and then attached it inside a much larger box so that the "Goblin" could fit inside. For the look of the machine, we were inspired by the one pictured here. To make the "Goblin" more a part of the machine, I made the spinner and the jackpot activated by him.
The major supplies I used were cardboard, hot glue, zip ties, mod podge, and paint. Once I had the machine assembled, I used orange glow-in-the-dark paint to color it. I also hot glued a plastic skull, plastic pumpkin, and battery operated lights to the top. To finish the “Goblin” we purchased a skeleton mask. To make a place to catch the candy inserted by the "player," I cut a hole in the bottom of an empty zip-tie container and cut a hole the same size in the top of the box. I glued those together so that the container would catch any candy. To remove it, the top could be unscrewed. I printed the words and pictures shown on the sides from free clipart on a color laser printer and mod podged them on cardboard. I used chocolate eyeballs as the candy for the jackpot.
The reactions included great surprise from people who didn’t realize that the spinner would spin or that they might win a jackpot, others who recognized how much work must have gone into it, people noting that it was the best costume they’d seen all year, and a lot of “That’s so cool!” As usual, the end result was worth all of the late nights, long weekends, and revisions!