Presto’s Blog

The folks a the Ellusionist blog invited discussion of what a list of the ten most dangerous effects in magic might include. I am pleased to add my vast knowledge of magic to this area of inquiry. My list of ten most dangerous magic effects (in no particular order) would include:

1. Straight Jacket Plummet. The magician is fastened into a straight jacket and dropped from an airplane at 30,000 feet, aimed straight at a platform covered in steel spikes. The magician must escape from the straight jacket and capture a parachute (that was dropped from the airplane at the same time the magician was) to have any hope of surviving.
2. Hitchcock Bird Production: The magician, dressed in evening clothes, produces copious ravenous, homicidal doves from thin air.
3. Sawing a Gang Leader’s Woman in Half. One mistake, and the magician is 187!
4. Plunger. Three Styrofoam cups are arranged on a table upside down by an audience member while the magician looks away. After turning around, the magician instantly smashes two of the cups. What makes this exciting is that two of the cups are empty, while the third hides a plunger connected to explosives which will destroy the entire building if activated.
5. Matrix. The magician places four coins on a close-up pad and covers them with four playing cards. The magician must try to secretly assemble all of the coins beneath one of the cards, even though his physical body has been enslaved by a race of robots and his mind is living in a computer simulation.
6. Cement Endurance. More of a stunt than a real magic effect, the magician is lowered into a dumpster which is then filled with concrete. Once the concrete dries, the magician must carefully manage what air exists while escaping with only the use of a few dental tools.
7. Great White. The magician attempts to locate a spectator’s selected card while being eaten by a shark.
8. Heavy Water Torture Cell. Like Houdini’s Chinese Water Torture Cell, but radioactive (great for nighttime performances).
9. Pullet Catch. A chicken cannon — used to test the ability of an airplane window to survive bird impacts — is loaded with a chicken that has been previously marked by a spectator. The hapless bird is fired at supersonic speed at the magician, who catches it. The effect is sometimes made even more deadly by using a frozen chicken.
10. Performing Card Tricks for Teenage Boys. Don’t even attempt this one; you will be driven insane.

A reader writes:

Ok of course I’m gonna be skeptical on how he walked on the lake. But you guys said he had batteries on him and electricity was going, to the bottom of his shoes that had strips of metal. Don’t you see what’s wrong with that,as I recall there was water below his feet where you say there was also electricity below his feet. Water conducts electricity those women would’ve gotten shocked when they touched below his shoes. They would’ve gotten shocked for even being close to him. Those cameramen inside the lake would’ve gotten shocked. What next thing you’re gonna say is the care bears are real. Hey those people in the lake would’ve gotten shocked.

I understand your confusion, but magicians take extreme precautions to make sure that nobody will be injured during the performance of their effects. In the case of the water walk, Angel had the lake’s normal water replaced with ionized water. Because the water had an electrical charge, it was pushed away from the magnets and therefore there was no way for water and electricity to mix! (There was actually a thin bit of space between Angel’s feet and the super-surface-tension water beneath him — he was technically hovering, not walking, across the water.)

Some people have asked whether those in the water beside Angel might be wearing rubber shoes to help ward off electric shock. This would not be effective since they are standing in water; however, I’ve heard a rumor that the women may have had their legs encased in a thick coating of skin-colored rubber, which would indeed do the trick.

I had time this weekend to do a little research and have posted the results in the main part of the Web site. This time around I have a clear, detailed explanation of how magician Criss Angel walked across Lake Mead on his Midfreak show, and the secrets behind Ellusionist’s newest effect Flow (which won’t be their newest after tomorrow, so I had to get this in as quickly as possible).

To this day I still get a lot of hate mail from people complaining about my original (and exacting) description of how Criss Angel walked across a swimming pool. Some people have even gone so far as to send me detailed mathematical proofs that my explanation is “impossible”. But doing the impossible is pretty much the essence of magic, isn’t it? Sigh — when will people learn.

Please keep sending me your questions. I’ll answer some more later this week.

Finally I’ve received another question! My dear new friend Jordan writes:

how does criss angel turns a little 8 year old to a 20 year old?

I have not personally seen Angel perform this effect, but the secret is well known to television magicians. The secret is simple: an eight-year-old child is selected and filmed. Then the camera is turned off and not turned on again for twelve years. After that period of time, the child is filmed again.

When the resulting film is played, the child seems to instantly age. You see, viewers assume that no time has passed when the camera is not recording, in the same way that a child will assume that you cannot see him when he has his eyes covered and cannot see you. It’s a simple psychological fact.

Don’t believe me? Watch Angel perform the effect again when you have a chance. Notice how his skin tone deteriorates slightly just as the girl ages “instantly”? It’s because a dozen years have passed.

Simple!

How nice! I’m starting to receive more mail that is neither insulting nor unprintable. I am pleased to answer selected questions on this blog, and will do so as they arrive.

A reader writes:

I went to see Derren Brown recently and in his act he went from behind a writing screen at one side of the stage into a gorilla suit at the other side of the stage with 3-4 seconds. How is this done?

There are many ways to accomplish the classic “Instant Gorilla Suit” effect. The most common method is for the magician to simply wear the gorilla suit beneath special “tear away” clothing. Behind the screen, the normal-looking clothing is ripped away in seconds by a team of well-practiced assistants, revealing the gorilla suit. The gorilla mask is hidden beneath a mask of the magician’s own face and revealed when the magician mask is pulled away.

But this is not the way that Derren Brown performs this effect. Because he has access to funds in excess of those available to most magicians, he is able to purchase advanced instant-gorilla-suit technology that allows him to perform without the use of assistants. Before the performance, Brown coats himself and his clothing in a thin coating of a special Instant Gorilla Paste (patent pending). This paste is invisible to the naked eye, but when activated by water (which Brown pours over himself while behind the screen) it instantly sprouts into a thick coat of black fur, making Brown look to the unpracticed eye as if he is wearing a gorilla suit!

Sorry not to have written in so long! I have been touring the country helping to promote Pixar’s new short film “Presto” which is playing before the wonderful cartoon WALL*E. Although I was not consulted in the creation of this film and neither Pixar nor Disney asked for my assistance in promoting it, the film was clearly named after me so it was the least I could do.

Now some might ask how I knew that I was the “Preso” the filmmakers had in mind. Consider these facts: The magician in the film was a magician, and so am I. He performed the “pulling a rabbit out of a hat” effect, and I have performed that effect (although using a far superior method, as detailed on Mallusionist.com). And the magician in the film looked nothing like me, and the only way he could have looked as little like me would be if an attempt was being made to avoid looking like me at all.

So thank you, Pixar, for allowing me to be your inspiration!

And speaking of inspiration, I want to invite you to visit my dear friend Nathan Allen at his wonderful Web site www.maniacofmagic.com. Nathan and I have been dear friends ever since he sent me a nice e-mail earlier today, and I hope you will give him all of your love, support, and — where possible — money.

Magician Jason Palter’s latest effect, iKnow, is quite an entertaining bit of mentalism. It begins with you allowing a spectator to borrow your iPod and listen to a song. Then you listen to their ear for the sound of the music “echoing about in their brainless head” (as one frequently assaulted street magician put it) and tell them the name of the song they were listening to. If all goes well, the spectator is so impressed that the idea of running away with your iPod instead of returning it never crosses their devious little mind.

I’ve worked on an effect like this myself, on and off, for some time. The biggest drawback, for me, is the fact that they keep telling me I’m voiding my warranty by opening up my iPod and doing a little soldering here and there to see if I can make something magical happen. So it was nice to find an effect like Palter’s that didn’t require all the hardware and expensive experimental short-circuiting.

The only problem I have with iKnow is that people keep looking at the songs on my iPod and pretending that they have never heard of Foreigner, Grand Funk Railroad, or other ever-hot artists. One magician who saw me performing suggested that I should “either update the collection or let folks listen to the music right off your 8-track.” As if I’m going to perform out of my car. Ha!

I would like to share with you a few things you might not know about one of my favorite illusionists, Andrew Mayne. Mayne is the creator of such memorable body-deformation effects as Chest Burster, Painful Dislocation, and — as made famous by The Amazing Johnathan — Jump Rope with Your Own Intestines.

Mayne has been performing personal transformations for as long as anyone can remember. One of his first effects involved doubling his own height over the course of only a few years, much to the delight of his parents.

He began performing publicly for large audiences as a teenager, and soon learned that he could perform more frequently — and cut down on his medical expenses — if he found ways of creating the illusion that he was (for example) smashing his own skull with a sledgehammer, rather than performing in a more direct manner. This is what led him to create Skullcrusher, the only published effect in which a magician destroys and restores a spectator’s signed, borrowed head.

Which reminds me, Mayne recently released an effect called Tear Down. At first, I was quite curious to learn what it was all about, in that I assumed (as you likely did) that the effect’s name was a reference to Ronald Regan’s famous suggestion that Gorbachev tear down the Berlin wall.

Well, it turns out that the effect has little to do with walls, politics, or the former Soviet Union. Instead, it is a torn-and-restored newspaper effect that can be performed with a borrowed, signed newspaper, regardless of what language it’s written in or how much more it focuses on Britney Spears than world hunger.

This is quite an evolutionary effect. I am in a position to know, in that I used to perform a similar bit of prestidigitation back in the day. I’d borrow a sheet of newspaper from a member of the audience (they were always reading the newspaper during my act), have another member of the audience sign their name in big letters across it, and then proceed to carefully, openly, and visibly tear it into tiny pieces before their very eyes.

Mayne’s effect takes this a step further by actually restoring the newspaper after all that tearing is done, and I have to admit that it is a big improvement over my old method. It makes me wonder if a restoration phase might have improved other segments of my act, such as when I would borrow a spectator’s watch and smash it with a hammer.

I’ll have to give that a try.

I keep hearing about the magicians’ code. What is it?

The magicians’ code prevents magicians from giving away their — or other magicians’ — secrets. This is done because revealing the secrets of magic would ruin magic as we know it, sending magicians out of their fabulous mansions and into the streets to earn their daily bread.

The code works like this: When writing, the letter “A” is replaced with “B”, “B” is replaced with “C”, and “C” is replaced with “D”. Other letters are replaced as well, but I will not give the entire code (or the arcane pattern used to generate it) here because it is proprietary to magicians. By using this code whenever discussing magic, the magician ensures that the uninitiated can never uncover magic’s deepest secrets.

You might be interested to know that some of the greatest magicians can not only write in magician’s code, they can speak in it. It’s quite impressive!

A few years back, Ellusionist released their Bicycle Black Tiger deck of cards — a deck with white ink on black paper, scented like a real Asian tiger. They proved so popular that a short time later the company began producing an entirely new deck — a deck with white ink on black paper, scented like a real Asian tiger that had some red ink on it — called the Bicycle Black Tiger deck (with red pips).

But they didn’t stop there. Tally-Ho Viper decks, decorated with the jaunty snake for which they are named, came in two different design — magic fan and inner circle — and were coated with an SUV500 Air-Flow Finish that not only made them more aerodynamic (for throwing), but also gave them the weight and rigidity to crush any lesser cards that got in their way.

Then, because a magician just can’t have enough black cards on hand, came the Shadowmasters. These are black and white like the Bicycle Black Tigers, but have an entirely different back and the SUV500 Air-Flow Finish, and are printed on paper made exclusively from trees on Ellusionist’s Magic Tree Ranch. The deck’s joker has a picture of what will be left of a magician who reveals the secrets of magic on YouTube, and its box sports a jaunty bar code and a UPC number created by an expert numerologist to deliver maximum luck to any magician within a radius of ten feet.

Coincidentally, upstart magic company theory11 — a company so new that they haven’t even had time to properly capitalize their own name — also got the idea to market black playing cards. Their first release was Bicycle Guardians. These black cards are identical to standard Bicycle cards except that they’re black and the angels on the back apparently engage in a regimen of weight lifting and steroids and have traded their bicycles for AK-47s. In keeping with their military feel, the cards have razor-honed Supersharp(tm) edges and explode if dropped.

theory11 continued their redesign success with Bicycle Centurions. These cards are designed to look exactly like cards that an ancient Roman centurion warrior magician who liked black cards might own. They’re printed on hammered bronze and hand stained, with all card values in Roman numerals. A complete deck weighs almost a pound.

But for the black-deck completist, Ellusionist is still the champion. For each black deck they sell, they also offer special gimmicked decks — tiny, jumbo, levitating, half-eaten, warped, bioluminescent, etc. They also sell several varieties of black invisible deck, but you have to take Ellusionist’s word that they are all different.

In the coming year, Ellusionist will be adding to its black deck collection. New editions will include:

• Night Eschers: With a back design inspired by the surreal art of M. C. Escher, these black cards will be specially prepared to form an Escher-like endless cycle — no matter how many cards you cut to the bottom of the deck, there will always be plenty on top.
• Disassembled: The ashes of a standard Bicycle deck.
• Securitypak: A black deck in which all cards have been glued together, glued into a box, and then sealed in bullet-resistant Lucite.
• The One Deck: An ultra-cool, black-and-white Old Maid deck.
• Dark Card-toon: A Card-toon deck with an African-American stick figure.
• Black Deck Socratics: A deck that looks, feels, and handles exactly like a standard Bicycle rider-back red deck, but is metaphysically devoid of color.

Presto recommends you buy them all!