OK, so he claims that no camera tricks or editing tricks are used in this show. I…guess we have to accept that or the show would be lame.
How did he:
make the marshmallow disappear when the kid was alone in the room. The kid puts the cup over the marshmallow, lifts it up, and it is gone. It’s not even inside the cup.
loop the two people with stretched ears. They have those stretchy ears with the hoops in them and he hooks them together.
I have no idea how he did half of his tricks without a ton of stooges (which would be really disappointing if true). He has so many prediction tricks where he doesn’t even touch the prediction. For example:
[ol]
[li]Stops a guy on the street.[/li][li]Writes a prediction on the card.[/li][li]Places the card face down on the guy’s hand.[/li][li]Asks guy to think of something.[/li][li]Guys says it out loud.[/li][li]Guy immediately flips over card - prediction is right![/li][/ol]
Now, I can think of three ways to do this. 1. Stop dozens of people, randomly guess until you get one correct, then only show the correct one and the rest end up on the cutting room floor (the brute force approach). 2. “Random” guy is in on it. 3. Some kind of camera edit. All of those would be kind of disappointing. I hope there’s something more elegant to it.
If he says that there are no camera tricks then I guess I have to believe him. But I think there has to be at least a little element of stooginess to some of these.
There’s one bit where he’s carrying a backpack and people ask him to pull random things out of it, essentially. These are items that look like they wouldn’t fit in the backpack at all, such as a full blender. Now pulling a full blender out of a too small backpack is an impressive enough trick as it is. But it would be flat-out impossible, I think, if the person asking could name any object at all. I think they have to be in on it, right?
And once you cross that line, it’s hard to tell how much to invest in the idea that these are really unsuspecting helpers. The bit where he pulls conspiracy theorists into his flower delivery van and extracts a chip from their arm, for example. It seems to me like you’d have to test a huge number of random strangers before you find even a couple willing to sit through that kind of procedure, if they weren’t clued in on it to start. But maybe I’m misjudging human nature.
I like the guy’s patter and I find some of the tricks really astounding, but I’m finding it hard to invest in watching the show without a firmer sense of where the ‘rules’ really are.
I haven’t watched it yet. Probably never will.
There was a clip trending on YouTube a few weeks ago, and everyone in the comments was convinced the marks were actors - and terrible ones at that. I tend to agree.
Nothing seems right with that clip. It really turned me off to the series.
I only saw the first episode and it was so obviously using actors, I just got turned off. I mean, in it he walks up to strangers in the park, holding a ton of helium balloons. Then after some back and forth, he takes their phone and ties it to the balloons and lets it fly away. None of the people he talked to did anything more that like look mildly annoyed. Then said phone ‘magically’ appears taped to his back under the shirt. I called bullshit on that is there was no chance for him to move his arms in a way needed to get that tapes to his back. And…well the people’s reaction as mentioned before.
My wife and I watched this series and we were debating the same thing. If he doesn’t use stooges or plants then I have no idea how he could possibly pull it off, as in the Magic backpack. If he is using plants, many of his tricks go from astounding to ‘eh’.
And the fact that he hired enough people as plants to fill an entire park to pull off the trick (prank, really) where he convinced a couple people that no one could see or hear them makes me bet on the stooge/plant theory for the other tricks as well.
I agree with the general comments here. I really WANTED to like the show. The parts of the show that seemed like non-faked magic tricks were excellent, and I really liked the personality and patter of the guy. But… there’s basically zero chance that the effects were presented in a massively deceptive fashion. And that just means you spend the whole time questioning everything, and that ruins the fun.
A real shame.
Has the host directly stated that absolutely no actors were used, no editing to alter appearances, and no other not-good-illusion shenanigans were used?
I know the show says no camera tricks, but they should really film one static flat camera angle as a backup to shut-up the naysayers.
I am not sure. I don’t think the kids were acting. One of them even starts to cry.
I suspect he asked a lot more people then we saw for the both the phone balloon and chip trick. I suspect a lot of people refused to give him their phone and refused to get in a windowless van.
I googled around some, including finding a fairly in-depth thread on reddit, and it seems that the host is adamant that there were no camera tricks… but offered no comment at all about either stooges or situations where, for instance, he had interviewed people ahead of time.
alot of liberal propaganda in that show, but the tricks were cool