Lately, mainly because of David Blaine’s recent special, there’s been a renewal of interest in magic. I’d wondered about this trick for ages (since I had first seen it), and it came up again, in an interview with Copperfield, where they showed a part of the trick in question.
Of course, we all know it’s trickery, otherwise, HE’D BE DEAD!! hehe…
but I’m wondering, how did he pull off the trick, where he gets sawed in half by the huge circular saw?
Just as a quick refresher, he has this 6’(?) diameter blade, set up, to lower at a set rate. He lays down under it on a table, cuffed to the table. the blade is started, and he tries to escape… when there’s supposedly about 5 seconds left on the clock, the blade drops all of a sudden, and chops him right across the gut. He then gets pulled apart, and his halves turned around, so he’s facing his feet, and he wiggles his toes.
now, I’m pretty sure those aren’t his own feet, but I can’t see how he could’ve hid half his body inside the table without anyone noticing him doing it.
Could someone please enlighten me on the procedure he used?
(it still creeps me out, remembering the first time I saw that, when I was in my early teens… “Holy Sh–!! he got cut in half!!!”)
When he climbs into the device, he is hidden by a black box. When in there, he shoves his skinny front half into a small tight space (if you look at the table, it looks thin, but there are levels of height that, because of perspective and the nature of tables, we at first tend to not notice) and pushes the fake legs out the back of the box.
Sorry, GuanoLad, I’m honestly not hounding you from forum to forum… but those feet you see are real flesh and blood human feet. Truly. Not animatronic. Merry xmas!
To say more about the ‘how’ would be to spoil the fun. What I can say is that while there have been ‘sawing in two’ effects ever since the 1920s (there’s some controversy over who exactly came up with it, Goldin or Selbit, and when) DC and his team worked long and hard to create the best ever version of this marvellous illusion, and it really IS the best. Enjoy it!
Yes, positive. It is for precisely this reason that at all (or most) of DC’s live shows, he has one of his team in the audience pretending to be a heckler saying “Move your feet!” or something similar, and of course the feet then do move and the toes wiggle too! If the movement doesn’t look very “life” like to you, well, I guess maybe it’s not that clear to everyone, and besides there’s only so much a foot can do to try and prove it IS a real foot! But positive - flesh and blood human feet.
As for Niagara… well, this isn’t the place to expose secrets and methods (at least not for me)… but yeah, not one of his best, was it? A shame, given how much time it must have taken to set up the sheer logistics of it.
Oh, and well done Muffin… best explanation I’ve ever heard! (Much better than the real one.) ROFL
Well, I’ve only seen him do it on that one TV show, so it’s maybe not the best example of it. I would imagine he does it in his live shows sometimes.
But the reason the legs didn’t look real to me is that they bent only one way. Feet can twist, and legs can move sideways, but they didn’t when I saw them. They were very single-axis.
Ah well, you speak like you have insider info, so I shall take your word for it.