Yes. Thank you.
So up v. down instead of close v. far.
But that just means he used some fake cards and not any real “magic”. That’s like something you can buy at the Disney Magic Shop at Disneyland. There was no physicality or talent or a “helleva lot of practicing” going on. If that’s the case I wonder why whoever asked him to be on the show.
Now in the larger sense it is cool that he paired “magic” with music and had a story to go along with it but just trick cards. Kinda lame.
Didn’t love Berdini. It was clear, just from the video, that the paper he was using to show Allison was “off” somehow. From her vantage it had to have been completely obvious to her that it was covered in a lenticular plastic.
But even ignoring that the trick was…not difficult and ignoring that it is sort of a new and clever idea for a trick (at least, I haven’t seen anything like it), there were still issues with the performance. Firstly, I mean…c’mon dude. How hard is it to come up with lyrics? Hey hey hey? Even if you only put the trick together that morning, you should still be able to improvise some lyrics.
But more importantly than that, the reveal just didn’t work really. With the way everything was framed, Allison has become the “everyman” of the trick. She’s our representative on stage. So when she’s told, “That’s not the word”, her reaction isn’t “Wow!”, because so far as she’s concerned, she was shown a word, she remembered the word, and she said the word. Being told, “You’re wrong”, isn’t a magical result. Her reaction, which ends up being our reaction, is pretty much just a “Whatever dude.”
There’s a trick where a magician brings someone up close and throws paper balls back behind the subject. We can all see the prank that he’s pulling on the person, and it’s funny to see how amazed the person is, when everyone can clearly see how silly the trick is. That works, even though the magician is sort of picking on the volunteer.
This trick doesn’t work. Even if someone didn’t know what lenticular sheeting was, I still suspect that they’d look up at Allison, see that she wasn’t too impressed by the trick, and come away feeling the same as her.
I just saw the trick that Yan Markson did a week or two ago. And by “same trick”, I mean the same trick:
- YouTube (Performed by Carl Einar)
And then Penn said that it was an updated piece from Tom Ogden…
I had always thought that magicians just took the technical tricks from one another, but still had to develop their own show. I didn’t realize that they were wholesale lifting whole routines off one-another.
Overall, though, Einar’s version was a lot better. Markson doesn’t seem to have been much of a clown.
:eek:
Well my minds blown. It’s almost as if these “magicians” are really magical at all and they’re just trying to fool us.
The same gimmick was used on AGT in a previous season. I assume it’s lenticular printing.
I’m not sure what happened in the act where Alyson put on the head phones. Penn seemed to be saying he used marked cards so someone offstage just had to tell Alyson which card to pull out of the deck but apparently that wasn’t it.
? I’m not sure that friedo was responding to my link for the same reason as I was posting it, but assuming that they were, the astonishment had nothing to do with fooling/not fooling, it was that the script and jokes were all the same between two different magicians.
Maybe that’s kosher in their world, I don’t know. But I would have assumed that it was a no-no.
I was just surprised that the guy apparently used a store-bought trick in his act on Fool Us - there was apparently nothing original in it except for changing the tape recorder to a phone. Most people on the show, even when doing classic stuff, at least try to put a unique spin on it.
Magicians often buy their tricks. They’re paying for the secret, maybe some props, and the patter. There are a lot of magicians who have never created any unique illusions themselves, but they usually do something to make it their own version.
Alyson’s been busy lately. 
Yeah, Berdini was pretty lame. Nothing to say about that one that hasn’t already been said.
Yan Markson - This was a fun, funny bit (original or not). Pretty sure that was a divided bag. Alyson pulls a couple random countries from one side, then he flips the divider, and all the slips on the other side were France. Penn was right though; using a clear plastic bag was a nice touch.
Ondrej Psenicka - I suspected a double deck switch. Penn shuffles a legit deck, Psenicka switches to a deck of all 8 of hearts, has Penn pick one, then switches back to the legit deck for Penn to “hide” his card in. (He definitely did something fishy when he took the cards back.) I think the headphones were simply instructing Alyson to make some funny magic-looking gestures and then find and reveal the 8 of hearts.
Though I have to imagine Penn would be able to catch a deck switch from that close, so I could be totally off. Still, good bit.
Glenn Morphew - Great sleight-of-hand artist! I enjoyed him immensely, though I kind of expected a bigger finish. (Maybe the last card going directly to the glass? I dunno.) Very impressive, regardless. I didn’t spot any of the moves.
P&T’s trick - I love how Penn winks at us during bits like this. Just as Teller reches in to break the jug, he says “Teller is one of the best sleight-of-hand artists in the world!” So there you have it. Entertaining as always.
I liked that Penn called the lady Snowden through the whole bit. Each time he said it it got just a little bit funnier.
When Penn takes the card, Ondrej then flips the deck toward himself ostensibly to show the faces to Penn. But when he the flips the deck again to hide the faces, he flips it sideways instead of toward himself again. So when Penn inserts his card back into the deck, it is now effectively upside down compared to the original deck. Any shuffling Penn does will not change the orientation of that card.
And since those aren’t normal cards (he sells them as a marked deck Butterfly Playing Cards | Indiegogo) he can somehow distinguish which card is upside down.
When watching in slow-mo it looks like the side of one of the cards doesn’t match the others so all he’d have to do is cut to that card, but it’s hard to tell with such a limited view.
Penn dropped the name of the trick Berdini did in his comments, it’s called “The 100th Monkey.”
So is the card Penn chooses unique (free choice) or forced 8 of hearts?
If it’s unique how does the supposed recording in the headphones tell Allyson what card to pull out?
Much better version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI7OXHJu_OA
And these guys on America’s Got Talent were just amateurs. The least Berdini could have done is sung the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Do You Believe in Magic?, although I suspect this wasn’t a very big hit in Italy.
Really enjoyed Glenn Morphew’s “card in pocket” routine – he made it seem so effortless.
It’s Will Tsai. Fortunately for us, Captain Disillusion covered this act. I highly recommend that channel by the way.
Yeah, so it’s just a marked card. Alyson is being instructed via the headphones to seek it out and pull it out of the deck. It’s obvious she’s searching for a specific card. I was surprised P&T gave it to him.
This latest episode was very disappointing. All the tricks had very simple solutions to them (although Morphew had the best execution overall). And I found it interesting that the first three were all foreign magicians with a specific theme and all four acts used Alyson as assistant. I have to assume that’s just a coincidence by the way the episode was assembled.
Well, that was certainly disillusioning. I always knew those shows used editing tricks but I didn’t think they’d actually employ visual effects to wipe away certain shots. I feel so used.
I have wondered about that. This was a case of putting a camera close up on the action in a taped show. In general, when magicians are videoed there is an attempt not to use angles the audience wouldn’t see and edit out anything that would reveal the secrets. The problem here is that if he did this right in front of the judges the gimmick would be obvious. He’s taking advantage of video for this effect so it doesn’t seem quite kosher to be editing it in a competition.