The waterfall may have been just to fool P&T. He’s got a lot of ways to do it but nothing was obvious to the guys. Really good performance too.
I need to take a look again. I’ve seen this done with a simple metal channel that runs from lapel to the pocket. I’ll see if he puts his ‘empty’ hand up to the lapel each time.
Maybe I’m just missing something (I don’t know a lot of how-to about magic), but I found this one really impressive. A lot of ‘switch places’ tricks have big delays where someone can leisurely move from box to curtain, lots of cover, and the like. They did the raising of the curtain, curtain over the face, curtain down, reveal sequence so quickly that at the end I really got a ‘no way they switched places!’ feeling instead of the usual ‘neat, I wonder how they actually did the switch during that long delay’ that I do with most.
Plenty of time for her to get out of the box while he’s holding the drape up part way. The record for the common trunk Metamorphosis is a fraction of a second.
How does the trick work?
Different ways, most likely he’s got a working key hidden on him that he extracts when he appears to be in a panic. They mentioned looking at the keys left in the tank because the working key that was tested earlier will still be there. That’s right, he lied when he said there was only one key that opened the lock.
I was thinking maybe he switched the lock and all of the keys (minus one) did work for this lock. Then he just pretends the first few don’t work.
I assumed that the assistant switched the entire batch of keys/glass as he was taking them over to the box to dump in. So ALL of the keys in the box actually worked, which was why he wouldn’t want P&T to take even a cursory look at the keys left inside.
OTOH, the guy was wearing baggy shorts and had a HUGE beard. It would have been utterly trivial for him to have had a second working key stashed there, for him to pull out and use when his air supply got low. Though in that case, he should probably have taken the risk of letting them examine the keys, both the ones in the box and the ones he’d tossed around – only one of them was the original “right” key, so what are the odds they’d have hit on that one to test or would have persisted testing past one or two keys?
There are a lot of ways to do it. Checking the keys in the tank would reveal it though. If it’s not a trick lock (or hasp) then I’ll bet he has a working key on him somewhere no matter how he did it. But clearly there’s at least one working key left in the tank.
Sure, there are several options with regard to getting the right key to the right lock. But still, the whole deal must be pretty intense for the performer regardless of training.
I wonder if there is a safety ‘out’ in case something in the trick goes awry? Perhaps he could simply stand up and that would pop the lid off the box in an emergency?
mmm
I’m sure he has a plan for escape. Maybe he knocks and they open it up.
Yes, it’s super intense. He is in the water for a long time. Very scary.
Okay after some research, I am going to guess…
[spoiler]Magnetoreception. I’m thinking that maybe the ink in the pen is ferromagnetic. When she places the paper down in the middle of the table, he (or a helper) flips a switch and a device under the table magnetizes it. The other three sheets remain demagnetized.
Granted, I don’t know my electronics well enough to say if that’s plausible.[/spoiler]
Whoa! I don’t know if you’re right (should we utterly discard theories because the magician says ‘nope’?) but that post led me to some utterly fascinating info I’d never heard a word about before, so many thanks!
For anyone interested, try this article: How birds use Earth's magnetic field to navigate - Australian Geographic
I’ve done my degrees in physics, so that is definitely in the realm of possibility. If so, it seems very clever.
Damn. browser ate my comment. I hate retyping this stuff.
Maybe I’m cynical or something, and maybe if this was on the 10:00 news, I’d feel different with the pretext of this being a “real” escape, but it’s even worse when we’re on a TV show whose purpose is specifically to acknowledge that the escape is a trick. The guy’s totally serious presentation came off boring and pointless to me. Such a long description for what is obviously a trick, and not overly original - at this point I don’t think we need the basics explained to us. Everyone’s seen an escape routine before. Presentation was my biggest problem.
I also hate that as soon as he has Alyson handle 3 keys to ostensibly avoid him tainting the prop, he immediately proceeds to put all the rest of the keys back into the cup himself - slipping in extra working keys maybe?
One questions I always have about these things - I know they have trick cuffs with quick-release mechanisms, but I also feel I’ve heard that even real handcuffs aren’t that hard to pick even with a bobby pin. Can I assume that the locks/handcuffs in tricks like this are generally quick-releases? This type of escape is so routine these days, the handcuffs and padlocks inside come off as a given.
Great presentation, first of all. Wonderful character.
I noticed a few things. The 8s were indeed side by side in the opening fan. Here’s what I think he’s doing (I didn’t read all the comments on this ep yet, so maybe someone else figured this out too).
He doesn’t reorder the deck from the top of the trick. He has Penn draw, then Teller the next card; then Penn return, then Teller. By doing so, he has reversed the order of those two cards (whatever cards they are - they have free choice). He has them cut the deck, but that doesn’t change the shuffle of the cards - just the start-end point.
I believe he has the full deck memorized. As such, when he deals the deck into 2, he knows exactly which cards should be in each pile - EXCEPT the two picked cards will be in the opposite piles. So he scans the first pile and finds the outlier card that shouldn’t be there. He asks if it’s Penn’s or Teller’s and therefore knows if the other outlier is the card that comes before or after the one he finds in the first pile. For that reason, he doesn’t have to look through the second pile.
Did I understand right that Penn suggested his jacket (the tuxedo jacket that doesn’t quite fit the fashion of belt-buckled jeans) has secret tubing to transport coins into the cup? I believe the ‘ditch’ point for his slight (if there is only one) is under the left armpit - at least the first two coins seem to be placed there. There may be a little slit in the suit to a tube. A horizontal left arm move appears to trigger the tube to let the coin travel. The last two coins seem to (based on audio) transport at the same time after the hanky - could be from a different load/ditch point, as I don’t see him play in his armpit with those coins; but I may have missed them.
This is a very clever yet simple gimmick (at least to me). The only minor issue is if Penn’s original ‘stop’ location was accepted, it was between paragraphs - if the first line isn’t a capital letter starting a sentence/paragraph, it would be notable if the audience member saw the cut location. She is quick to dispose of the rest of the article which is always a tell that there’s a fix on the prop.
Penn drops the deck out of frame before raising the ‘perfect fan’ into position and it looks too perfect and quite a wide fan that makes me assume it’s a pre-glued prop and the volunteers are still plants.
One of the intrigues of the original trick was that a) maybe people didn’t know as much as they know now that P&T aren’t a classic magic act but are almost anti-magicians; further, the lavishness of a couple of poor non-name comedians being able to get the times square boards to help with their trick on a late night sketch show. It’s not as impressive to see Vegas Superstars able to get a vegas billboard the assist in a trick for their own TV show.
Just not quite as decadent as it may have once been. I also get the feeling that they are now on season 4 and they have done all their common bits so they are now mining the archives.
Another bit of chicken trivia: “Just before hatching, a chick turns in the shell so its right eye is next to the shell (and absorbs light through the shell) and its left eye is covered by its body. As a result the right eye develops near-sightedness to allow a chicken to search for food, while the left eye develops far-sightedness, to allow a chicken to search for predators from afar. That is why when a hawk flies overhead, you will notice your chickens tilt their heads with their left eye to the sky.”
So when Curry walks down the platform, the text is too close to see, so she naturally ignores it and just watches the floor. When she turns around, now she can see the text.
It’s possible that he didn’t need to train the chicken to go forwards all the way, just be sure to release it on that side of the platform. The chicken will naturally go all the way then turn around when it realizes that it’s hit a dead end.
Matt Johnson (underwater escape): My thoughts echo Penn’s in that, even knowing he’s practiced and it’s a trick and not as dangerous as it looks, the simple fact of having a guy trapped in a box in water brings a bit of a visceral thrill to it. So it works from that angle… but beyond that, I was unimpressed. The whole bit about there only being one key falls flat from the get-go as there’s no future verification - he could have dropped more real keys in himself, or had a real key hidden somewhere in his pockets (or beard, heh). No verification about the cuffs or any of the other locks, which I assume are all modified. The physical aspects, especially working to hold his breath, are good, but the actual trick is lame.
Siegfried Tieber (card trick): Best one of the night. Didn’t care for his character (it was bordering on that awkward/weird persona that so many magicians seem to use, doesn’t do anything for me) but the trick was a good one. My first guess, like Penn’s, was that there was a force during the waterfall (given that he’s the one doing the cards and can stop when he wants when Penn says “stop”) but apparently that wasn’t it. So I bet there’s a math component to it, but I’ll let smarter people figure that out. I did notice that both times he cut the deck himself before having P&T cut, I bet that features in somehow.
Jason Fields (transporting coins): Another cool trick, well done. TheHYPO correctly points out the first two ones seem to go into his left armpit (transferring the coin, then ditching it when he seems to just be placing the wand in the crook of his armpit). I bet the blue handkerchief has a false coin in it that P&T feel when holding it (as he just ditches it later without opening it). Maybe he ditches the other two when he’s pulling up his sleeves?
Jessica Jane Peterson (word on arm): Boy was I worried when she started doing fire-eating, thankfully that wasn’t her actual trick. I admit this one had me fooled, I thought that it might be case of there only being 4-5 word choices at the start of each sentence, and then she’d have the various words along her arms and be able to reveal the one she wanted. But Penn’s comment and numeroussyrup’s comment point out the real answer.
It happened to me here which is why my comments were so short 
I was watching another routine from an older season on youtube and the magician had commented on his video by saying that the producers don’t just want to only show card tricks. I think this makes sense because four card tricks, while great, don’t make for a good hour of television. So my guess is they are trying to mix things up and also have enough variety to make each episode feel unique.
I’ve never heard that about real handcuffs. I also believe the way the put on handcuffs these days is different and impossible to even pick if you could, at least from my naive understanding. Any time a magician says handcuffs, I just assume they are trick handcuffs.
Ah now that is clever! I knew the parity would be kept between the halves but it didn’t occur to me to switch the order. Actually that makes the trick even easier because you only need to memorise 26 cards instead of 52. Incidentally, youtuber comments pointed me towards the same trick called Neither Blind Nor Stupid by Juan Tamariz which is indeed where he got the patter from. However I think the methods are slightly different since the cards are shuffled, or at least appear to be.
This is why I am curious what the rig looks like.
I would imagine she does the trick exactly like she did it on the show with a regular audience. Incidentally, the reveal is also one of the oldest reveals I know since I had a friend in high school who was into magic and did this exact reveal although not with ash or soot but with regular dirt.
If you’re interested, listen to the podcast I link to in the old thread. Penn goes into a lot of detail about the trick, including how they got away with it on SNL by saying “pre-recorded video”. And yes, the fan is fake.
BTW did anyone see P&T on the Tonight Show? They did the bit with the inflatable costumes which is quite old based on documentaries I’ve seen of P&T. A neat little trick and that is very much Penn and Teller. They also do a fun bit backstage with an egg cup trick from their magic set.
Man, who knew ordinary old chickens had so many neat tricks? Now I feel guilty about last night’s supper.
I thought we were encouraged to eat “Smart Food”? 