The producers know how the trick was done. They have stepped in before to say that Penn and Teller were right when the magician said they weren’t. If he had two rings and one was gimmicked to come apart they wouldn’t have let him get away with showing that the other wasn’t gimmicked.
The deck switches back when he takes the pen from Fred and puts it (and the deck) into his jacket pocket. If you step through frame by frame, you can see a few frames where he takes the deck out of his pocket.
As for how the dollar bill gets into the box, well, it never does. It remains palmed in his left hand. He opens the box with his right hand, and then picks it up with his right hand only and pretends to cast its contents on the table. As he does this he simply throws the dollar bill from his left hand, and your eyes assume that it came from the box rather than his left hand. You can see this clearly if you watch frame by frame at the very beginning of the overhead shot.
Actually, I should clarify that the deck never switches “back” because it was always the hollowed-out deck up until the moment that he puts it into his pocket and replaces it with a real deck. You’ll notice that, before this point, he never spreads the cards from the deck and always holds it tightly in his hands. There are only a few real, uncut cards, one of which he gives to Janine and the rest of which he simply shifts from the top to the bottom, or vice versa, when he pretends to shuffle the deck.
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Pierre Ulric: Penn ruled out the hood and blindfold as being opaque, so I still have no idea how he could have seen through it to draw the guy. As for eyes on the bottom of his shoes, when I watched it again, I did notice him step on Penn’s drawing for a few seconds while he was wearing those silly glasses, so I’m wondering if there’s a connection there (some sort of camera?).
[/quote]I suspect that the hood and blindfold are indeed opaque, but are both far enough off of his face that he can see underneath them a little bit. He doesn’t need to see anything very far away from him; only the drawing (and he can practice that enough that he doesn’t need a lot of looks).
And I really thought I saw him substituting when he took the crumpled up drawing from the audience member-- he holds it really weirdly, and keeps his palm pointed away and 3rd and 4th fingers unnaturally curled, like he was hiding something in there. Plus the drawing doesn’t look that crumpled afterwards. Maybe he was intentionally making it look like a swap, to get P&T to guess wrong ? Because he doesn’t need to do that if he just takes a picture of Penn’s drawing with his shoe.
I think with enough practice he could indeed do the picture blindfolded, including Penn’s drawing, which he knew from a camera on his shoe. Not that mystifying of a trick, but fairly entertaining nonetheless.
He needs to see the volunteer’s face too; how would he manage that?
I didn’t even catch on that it was supposed to be a drawing of the audience volunteer. Thought it was either himself or just a random drawing of a person.
This week’s Fooler was Xavier Mortimer doing a cute little act with a balloon. It was an entertaining little bit, but I was surprised P&T were fooled. The trick was based on the balloon rising when he held Alyson’s hand, falling when he let go, and it burst when she gives him a peck on the cheek. I think it’s very obvious that the string on the balloon is a thin plastic tube with a valve running between a small tank of helium and the balloon. He starts with the valve closed and the balloon stays just off the ground, he can turn the valve one way to allow helium to flow into the balloon and it will rise, or he can turn it another way to release helium and it will fall. In the end he just keeps the valve open in the fill position and the balloon will burst. The string is obviously not string at all, it’s stiff enough to hold it’s shape while suspended from the balloon, just like a thin plastic tube.
I think P&T don’t guess as much as they used to. If they don’t know how the trick is done they may give up then, or in the case of the Garrett Thomas and his ring make the guess overly specific so that any deviation will be considered a ‘Fool’. Nothing wrong with that really because they are hard to fool because of their encyclopedic knowledge of magic, and if you have something they’ve never heard of you did get the best of them in a sense.
Agree with TriPolar. I thought it was very obvious how the balloon trick worked (exactly how you described, I’d say), so I was surprised they just let it go and gave him the award.
It does seem P&T are more content lately to just say it’s a good act and not try to bust the magician. This is a good example.
(And I’m still dying to learn how that ring trick was done.)
On Penn’s podcast about Garrett Thomas and whether he used a gimmick ring
“This is an editing problem. I believe in my question we were talking about one particular phase of his routine. That changes everything. I don’t think the ring on Teller fooled us. So we were talking about the part that fooled us, not the part that didn’t.”
Another episode got stealth dropped this week. Tony Clark won with his Slydini-of-hand. I thought it was a deserved win, even after multiple rewatches.
Just got a chance to re-watch Tony Clark. Very well done in the style of Slydini. He was doing plenty of the simple type of sleight of hand, just point in one direction while the action happens somewhere else, but he took it that further step to make us believe nothing was happening at all when he loaded up that little box. A fitting tribute and wonderful act to have in the season’s closing episode.
So what is the code hidden in the name “Slydini?”
Something to do with “slide?”
I was pretty bored by Tony Clark…you can clearly see all of his moves. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good show - I am eternally impressed by good sleight of hand.
But then the wooden box! WHAT?! Boredom canceled. The student has become the master! Amazing shit!
I love it when the magicians take me for a ride like that 
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So what is the code hidden in the name “Slydini?”
Something to do with “slide?”
[/quote]I suspect it’s rather referring to some technique that The Great Slydini either invented or was known for among magicians (or maybe just very good sleight of hand in general, since apparently that’s what he was known for)
How did he load the box? I only watched it once.
So how did all the other magicians in this episode do their tricks? This episode was unusual in that I haven’t been able to figure out most of the main tricks, even after repeated viewings.
You see him lift the larger outer box and to reveal three balled up pieces of paper allegedly containing the rings sitting on the tray. He puts that outer box down on the table behind the tray, and it extends past the back edge of the table. He pushes the outer box forward all the way onto the table, and it now encloses the smaller box. When he puts the outer box back on top of the tray you can see how he is picking up both the outer box and the little box within it to place on the tray.
Gotta rewatch, I’ve mainly forgotten it. I remember the first guy had the audience member write down her birthday, knew right then his magic would be revealing her birthday.
I wanted to post this in the Season 2 thread, but it’s closed so I’ll just mentioned here that this week’s episode of This American Life has a segment on the Invisi-Ball Trick, which Teller performed on episode 2 of season 2:
Host Ira Glass interviews Penn and Teller (separately) about the conception, development, and execution of the trick. In fact, Teller actually performs the trick close-up for Glass, allowing him to see exactly how it’s done. Glass wasn’t permitted to explain to the radio audience the exact mechanism, though what he does say about his reaction of the trick (even knowing how it’s done) is well worth hearing.
Incidentally, later in the same episode David Kestenbaum does a very nice segment on how David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear. Yes, we all know how it was done (or are just a Google search away from the explanation) but Kestenbaum makes the piece interesting by tracking down and interviewing some of the people who were involved in the performance.