We just saw the first episode of “Wizard Wars” on SyFy channel – sort of a Project Runway or FaceOff competition, but with magicians. It was delightful and charming and wonderful (introduced by Penn & Teller, who are one of the judges).
Contestants (team of two, amateur magicians) were given three objects (deck of cards, can of spam, and super-shooter squirt guns) and had to make up a routine using all three. The winning team then went up against two “wizards” (professional magicians), both teams had to set up a show involving four objects (mannequin, fencing sword, chalkboard, and glasses).
There’s probably not a lot to discuss, but I just wanted to express our enjoyment.
Do they reveal how the tricks are done? If not, that would seem to cut out a lot of the potential content. If so, I would think they would get in trouble with other magicians.
Did they tell us how long the wizards had to create the tricks? They give the impression its only a few minutes but some of tricks looked like they would have taken maybe hours to build and perfect. I can’t believe the audience sat quietly for the time it too the magicians built props in the back.
After watching the show with my son, we came to the conclusion that since we had never heard of any of the “wizards” anyway, a good twist would be that any of the amateurs that win the wizard challenge should get to replace those wizards on the wizard panel for upcoming episodes.
And I thought all the judges gave great comments and insight. Even though I gave a :dubious: to the girl’s title of “magic critic”.
I was thinking along those lines. If the show lasts do a “wizards” competition like how they pick Iron Chefs.
I enjoyed the show - seeing four cool magic acts in an hour ain’t bad. But I do wish we knew more about time involved in prep and some more about the judging.
(I think the Canuks should have won. You come up and include a trick Penn has never seen and that should be an automatic win)
I checked it out last night (available on iTunes, woot!) I liked it. Actually, I think it was some of the best magic I’ve seen (other than a few tricks, from the wizards).
I suspect that the way they film the show is that the team who doesn’t go on to fight the wizards still had to come up with a trick for the wizard battle, and probably there was a whole set of clips of that process that they had all ready to go if the judges selected one or the other.
I thought the Canadians were far better than the wizards. Even ignoring the card trick, the whole manequin bit was far more interesting and involved. The wizards basically just played pranks on a guy for a minute, and their chalkboard bit was reveal-and-done far too quick to have any impact. Not to mention that - even though I don’t know how it’s done - I have to imagine that it’s far more difficult to write on a chalkboard by dropping chalk dust onto it, than by being able to stand behind it, with your whole body hidden.
I really didn’t see what the basis could have been for the judges to have selected the wizards. Perhaps I’m wrong in my guess for how the filming transpires. Maybe the judgements were already done back during the long process of coming up with and building the tricks, so that the losing team didn’t have to come up with a wizard-battle trick. And maybe the Canadian team spruced up their bit since then?
If they said, I didn’t catch it. Obviously, the first round, they had a bunch of time to prepare. The final round, it’s not clear. I suspect that they must have done most of it long in advance – not possible for an audience to sit there for the hours it must have taken to work out the skit.
Or else maybe the filmed a bunch of episodes interleaved, so they were doing the preliminary for one episode while the teams were off inventing their tricks for the next episode, or something?
I did enjoy it… but I made the mistake of watching it On Demand instead of actually DVRing it, making it much harder to rewind and fast forward, which I enjoy doing while watching magic tricks to try to figure out how they were done.
I feel like at least 3 of tricks we saw (the two watergun reveals, and the chalk dust reveal) must have had a similar principle, I’m guessing something like:
Write on the back of the chalkboard with some kind of magnetic dust, then the water/chalkdust has something mixed in which either will or will not be magnetically attracted…
The thing I was most surprised by was the pulling the foil out of the purse. If that was truly a random lady in the audience at a random table, then I have no clue how it was done, since presumably it would require a false bottomed purse and a gimmicked table with the sword going down into a table leg, or something along those lines.
I LOVED the voodoo poke-the-lady-in-the-butt moment.
I just watched this, and found it to be pretty entertaining. The set up of two teams dueling with given props, and then the winner going up against a pro team for a second duel is intriguing.
I can see why Penn and Teller are in the judge chairs and not the Wizard chairs - there’s no upside there for them. They win - oh, look, you lost to Penn and Teller. They lose, the $10,000 is gravy to beating Penn and Teller!
It’s nice they have other judges, as otherwise there’s a lot less to be said about the performances, with only one speaker.
I was less thrilled with them showing bits of the groups working up their acts back stage. I think it’s more surprising to not have insights into their ideas. But they did manage not to reveal too much (except for the bit with the fencing foil).
Actually, I have heard of Angela Funovits. I think I saw her on the NBC show Phenomenon, which was about selecting a magician.
The four are Gregory Wilson, Angela Funovits, David Shimshi, and Justin Flom; they are professional magicians with established careers and some level of recognition from the field. They obviously aren’t as well known as Penn and Teller, but they are pros.
The challengers are up-and-comers trying to establish a name for themselves.
That’s ChristenGerhart. I had to look her up. She’s a magician (and astronomer who works for NASA Jet Propulsion Labs) who does reviews for a magic collaboration website called “theory 11”.
Yeah, more information would be nice. I just dug up this video of the original idea from Justin Flom. It has all the components: two teams of two individuals paired up and given four random items and one hour to make a magic show, then perform for an audience, and then get judged for a winner.
So keeping the audience busy for an hour doesn’t seem that difficult.
Amusingly, they actually showed more details of how they were planning to make the tricks work, so it was definitely a magic insiders show, revealing how they were going to do the tricks before they performed them. Yet I kinda liked it. Hmmm.
Well, they did win that round. Oh, you mean the whole show.
Well, given the stuff we were shown about their backstage setup, I would say
the chalkboard has two flip panels, so they write on the panels and then flip them behind the screen.
No, I think they voted on what we saw, but the deliberations of the judges happened during the commercial breaks, so we don’t know how they did that. Did they leave the audience to deliberate in the back? I would guess so.
I agree with you, I thought the Challengers were better. The main flaw in their performance was with the glasses pull from the chalkboard. They didn’t set up what they were doing very well, and Ekaterina didn’t have time to perfect the staging, so her body moved in the way and blocked the view of what she was doing.
My guess on that
[spoiler]The chalkboard had a panel on that “head” that opened so she reached her hand through the board to extract the glasses. The thump she gave was to make sure the panel returned to the closed position - spring loaded?
The zing to the girl was produced by something in the guy’s pocket. His motions were too obvious. But it worked. [/spoiler]
But even with that, I liked theirs better. I also liked that they didn’t make a pretense to mystical powers, they admitted they were doing tricks to give that appearance.
Amen to that. On Demand is a horrible interface that just manages to be better than missing the program.
Well, the two image reveals were some chemical in the cloth/paper. That’s a good guess for the chalk reveal.
No,
it was a gimmicked sword. The scene in the shop showed him putting the fencing foil on the band saw and cutting the end down. I would assume he made a telescoping arrangement of some sort. Still, palming that hilt into the bag was impressive.
And I will point out, Kyle Marlett (the competitor on the show) is the same guy Kyle Marlett in that tryout video. I will also point out that Ekaterina also has a connection to theory 11.
I also noticed that one of the cofounders of theory 11 is Mathieu Bich, whom I recognize because he was on Penn and Teller’s show Fool Us, and won. He did the card prediction trick that P&T didn’t guess, and had the box with “No” printed inside for when they asked if he had multiple decks.
The first performance, the guys had a great repartee, and the trick was more fully integrated. Every element was part of the same trick. The card pick, set up the card deck for the reveal, play with the spam, put the initials on the spam, pull the cards, then reveal the initials on spam in the card box. Then finally get the guess and use the super soakers for the reveal on the initial card pick. All tied together in flow to a final result. Their weakness was a little slow getting through everything.
Also, I’m wondering if the plastic glove was actually important. Penn has said (on Fool Us) that when a magician has a prop that he doesn’t seem to care about, it doesn’t seem integral to the trick, just looks like a nice extra or a decoration, often that is actually a key element to the trick. (Example would be a staircase for the magician climbs into a box and then disappears; the staircase is helpfully wheeled off stage to get it out of the way, setting up the magician’s later suprise reentry from the back of the room or as one of the disguised stagehands.) In this case, the glove appears to just be a joke to offer it to the girl and then the magician wear it instead. I’m wondering if he actually used it for cover to aid his palming of the initialed piece of paper and/or spam.
Whereas the Canadian team had the more surprising trick with the card initials, but it was not as cohesive a trick. They had a Spam can disappear, then they did a separate gag with Penn writing his initials on a card and making that disappear. Then they did the pick a card and finally pick a host, using the super soakers to reveal the host pick. And finally a reveal of spam to tie it back. That tie back helped, but really the spam wasn’t integrated into the trick, and the part of their trick that was amazing wasn’t tied to the rest of the trick. They win on novelty and on not getting bogged down, but the first guys had better integration.
For the second round, it is hard to see how the Wizards won. Without being privy to more of the arguments from the judges, it feels like it was a case of “we can’t have them beat the wizards on the first show”. Maybe there is real justification, but we didn’t see it.
Rubic’s Cube, smooth operation with one hand, but not deceptive.
Team 1: Murry Sawchuck and Rob Anderson
Team 2: Eric Buss and Mattias Ramos
Challenge round objects: milk crates, dog biscuits, and a puppy (!)
Team 1 has good showmanship, good team dynamic, good effort using the live animals, but it was all repetition of the same trick. Appearance, disappearance, transformation, again and again.
Team 2, Penn loves the skit and the way it explains the box. Christen loves the story, though she says she saw a few tiny flashes. Good use of the audience to do the light/heavy box. Lots of creativity, decent deception given what they have.
The judges decide Team 1 had better use of the dog treats, but Team 2 had a little better creativity (more variety of tricks) and upped the cute factor by dressing the puppy in a lion suit. Winner, Team 2.
Jason Latimer (judge) does a show, using a bowl and two pitchers of water. He has a volunteer check the bowl and water to confirm there are no hidden compartments or gimmicks. Then he talks about shaping and controlling water, surface tension, holds his hands in the bowl, and suddenly pulls out a sphere of water all jiggly and wobbly. Then he hands it to the volunteer, finally pops it back into the bowl.
When the volunteer is holding it, there is a surface defect visible on the sphere of water. It is clearly some kind of membrane.
Still, it is a very good trick.
Wizard War objects: a kimono, a rainbow golf umbrella, a bag of hard candy, and an armoire (a closet)
Wizards: Justin and Shimshi
The challengers have a nice skit that builds, using the premise of balancing acts. I like the way it flows from a simple balance to more and more complicated balances, and finally they “balance” the armoire on one of the umbrellas. As Penn says, not very deceptive, but very entertaining and very funny. It is a cohesive story to use all the parts, and lots of creativity in not using the armoire for the obvious guy-in-a-cabinet trick. The judges state that the wizards are going to have to be really deceptive to beat this team’s level of funny.
The wizards use the armoire for the more conventional appearance, with Shimshi magically appearing in the box. They do some good set up to prove nobody is coming through a trapdoor in the floor, and the judges praise them on that.
That’s a misdirection. If you notice, the platform that the armoire is on is a lot bigger than the box. So Shimshi rides out inside the box, then slides out the back. Open, show the inside, stage the bag, close doors. Shimshi slides back in. Hang the light where Shimshi is behind it, and he slides his hands in front for the shadow effect. Then open the doors and Shimshi has appeared.
Nice trick with the die to pick the color of the kimono. Not sure how they did that. Shimshi does the linking ring trick with two lifesavers, that’s pretty impressive. Justin’s trick with the headphones to pull the candy out of his throat is well done.
Jason didn’t like the flow of big tricks at the beginning and small at the end. Penn thought that was okay, but wished they had “talked away” the headphones - why use them? But they had a better use of the candy in the act. Overall it was a great performance.
In the end, the judges had set the bar high by saying the deceptiveness of the wizards would have to be really high to beat the funny of the challengers, and they decided the challengers won.
I’d have to re-watch, but I wonder if that was a forced-choice. They started the umbrella with red on top, and then counted three counter-clockwise to get to green. If the dice had been 5, they could have gone clockwise to get to green. Not sure what the other numbers might have led to, but I wonder if there was some such gimmick?
I had this on after Face Off and was just about to change the channel when PUPPY!! So I had to watch. I wonder how long they actually take to create the tricks.
They said they were starting at the top and counting CCW, then had her tell the number. I could see getting 3 or 4, depending on which they picked first (the one they were on, or the one next to it). I couldn’t work out how to get any other number.
I don’t think they made it clear whether they were going to move the UMBRELLA counterclockwise or move their HANDS counterclockwise, if you see what I mean, which lets them go either way. Combine that with the ability to have “1” be the starting square or “1” be the next square, I suspect you can force ending on green whenever you like.
I enjoyed all the performances, but I think the judges definitely got it wrong this time. The balancing was fun, but at no point was I like “WOW that was a good and baffling trick”, whereas the wizards caused me to have that reaction several times, and they had some cute and fun touches themselves, such as their use of the garment bag.
(Although possibly my favorite magic moments were some of the clips of the wizards setting up their show, with some sleight of hand involving a floating lifesaver and a color-changing sucker, REALLY well done.)
The magic, I have no comments. It’s entertaining, and obviously the primary draw.
And that, as I see it, is the problem with the show: the “competition” format. As a viewer, what is interesting is the performances, not the competition. Frankly, I don’t care who wins the competition, so once the magic is over, there really isn’t anything keeping me from changing the channel once they go to commercial before the “climax” of the judges picking a winner.