I’ve been catching up and watching the episodes on YouTube.
I’m impressed with how many magicians are from different countries. Seems like the show is using more than past seasons.
I 100% saw him load the walnut under the meta l cup - but I did not at all see him swipe the pea from under Teller’s glass or put it into a walnut under the table.
I found this more entertaining than Green’s egg trick. And Penn busted him much more overtly on the rigged die. But that was only part of the trick. Shortland could have somehow made sure that Jonathan’s phone ended up in envelope #4. But since he didn’t put the die into the shaker until after the stickers were in place, I’m thinking he had six dice at the ready and knew which envelope to keep safe. But for the life of me I couldn’t catch how.
He did a little move with the shell that ended up under the glass, I assume kicking the ‘pea’ backward off the table, but I couldn’t see anything in the video, maybe it was gone before then. I mentioned upthread that he probably loads the walnut when he gets the ‘stolen’ wallet out of his jacket.
Look closely at the envelopes - each one has the word “Random” written slightly differently. (Uppercase and lowercase N’s, different parts of the R connected and disconnected, etc.) At 2:30 he peaks to see which envelope is still empty, then just makes a note of which number Johnathan applies to that envelope after loading the phone. Then at 3:29 he retrieves the box and palms the needed fake die, which he swaps with the real die when he puts it in the box.
9/23 Episode
Lucy - OK, I get that the book was on a spring, but where was it before it was in the bag?!?!
French Guy - good trick, fooler, but he seemed to stop riffling through the deck way before someone said “stop.” Still impressive.
The ‘book’ was in the bag. It’s a folded up box like thing that springs open to look like a book. When she drops it behind the table it gets caught by something behind the table and simultaneously a real book is released to hit the floor.
Season 6, Episode 12 (September 23, 2019)
Lucy Darling: Book bag.
Perfect explanation, thanks. I’m guessing on the list of books for the volunteer to pick, Harry Potter was the only recognizable one. (I really liked her joke about Fifty Shades of Grey being for ‘interior designers with depression.’)
Nestor Hato: Aces in the hole (fooler). This was a neat card trick which I guess relies completely on sleight of hand (even more impressive doing it under their noses).
Alfonso Rituerto: Coffee tricks. Making the cup ‘appear’ from sugar was probably the worst gag I’ve seen on the show. Making the coin appear under the mound of sugar is a little trickier…was it as simple as there being a second coin?
Keelan Leyser & Matt Daniel-Baker: Digital illusionists. So after looking at the instagram, I’m thinking the account was on private before the trick was revealed. They likely filmed every single combination of country/object and then just made the ‘right’ one available (and deleted the evidence).
R.I.P. Billy the Mime.
Honestly, two of the lamest, easiest to understand, and borderline amateur tricks they’ve had on the show in a long while. I am not one to be overly critical, but both of these did not rise to the level of being on the show.
Very nicely done, so impressive. I loved his trick and I could tell that Penn and Teller did, too. It is not hard to see when they are impressed and when they are not. They were definitely impressed with his moves and would need more time than allotted to figure out what he did.
Just got around to watching Episode 12. Some thoughts:
Lucy Darling: Easily the most annoying act I have ever seen on the show. I absolutely hated the way she kept breaking character in order to talk about her character. The show has seen plenty of magicians with memorable and exquisitely performed personas, and nary a one had to talk up their performance. Can you imagine if John van der Put spent his entire pre- and post-trick interviews bubbling about this hilariously irreverent Piff the Magic Dragon character he’d come up with? Or if Rob Zabrecky and Dan Sperry suddenly dropped their weirdness shticks the moment the judging began?
Regarding the trick itself, I came to the same conclusion that TriPolar did as soon as Penn said the word “spring”. If you’d like to see an even better act making use of springed props, check out my Explain Dinardi’s flower magic trick thread from a few years back.
Nestor Hato: I guess this one relies exclusively on sleight of hand, though I didn’t spot any of the moves. Very slick.
Alfonso Rituerto: Another disappointment. Most of his moves were so obvious, though some of this may be down to unfortunate (for him) camera angles. Regarding how he gets Alyson’s coin into the pile of sugar, I’m pretty sure that there is a small slot in the table and a small slit in the tablecloth directly overtop. He is careful to pour the cup of sugar directly over this slit. After he takes the signed coin from Alyson, he exchanges it for a different marked coin, and puts Alyson’s under the table and puts it into a track where it rolls into position underneath the hole. You can even hear it loudly clink into place when he says “You should not put your coin near the sugar”. He then operates a lever, either with his hand or his foot, that pushes the coin up through the slot and into the sugar pile. (He might do this when he says “Thank you”, when his left hand is under the table.)
Keelan Leyser & Matt Daniel-Baker: Yet another disappointing trick. As others have said, this was done by creating a large number of videos (one for each possible combination of flag and item), uploading them in advance to a private Instagram account, and then having a confederate delete all but one of the videos before making the account public at the conclusion of the trick. The magicians didn’t even need to do too much grunt work here; if you watch the video carefully, you can see that there are separate flag and item shots that have been spliced together. So if they had six items and 100 flags, they would have had to record only 106 videos rather than 600, and spend comparatively little time editing them together.
Since they specifically instructed the Turtle Guy to not look at the screen while selecting the country, my assumption was that it would display Japan no matter what was touched. Then I figured they used a weighted die that comes up six every time. That would have saved them the trouble of making multiple videos. But it wouldn’t have made the trick any less unimpressive.
Yes, very simple trick and honestly hugely unqualified for this show. Their hope was that Penn and Teller would simply guess that the trick was a force and be wrong.
I figured this until Penn guessed correctly that they did the other thing, the laborious creation of videos.
Does ANYONE actually enjoy the iPhone/iPad sort of “screen”-based tricks?
(Halfway through this last one, I applied my time-compressing “digital magic” skills and fast-forwarded to something that might be interesting/entertaining…)
Septerber 30, Season Finale.
Two excellent sleight-of-hand acts and two meh mentalist acts.
Woody Aragon and Sinbad Max didn’t really have any groundbreaking stuff, but they were both a pleasure to watch. I caught Sinbad on two moves; other than that he was at least a step ahead of me. Woody was absolutely flawless. It was less a matter of “How did he do that?” than “Wow, he’s really good at that!” Great stuff.
Denny Corby obviously had a tiny printer in his wallet. Technology is indeed amazing, but it also means pretty much everybody is on to you with something like this. Not sure how he got the $83 in the pocket though. I didn’t rewind to see if his hands were anywhere near George’s jacket after the selections were made. If he pulled a switcheroo it was pretty smooth.
John Walton’s Mona Lisa magic square (fooler) was a real head-scratcher for me as well. Did he have a set of cards indexed for every number from 3 to 18? If so, where did he make the switch? And how did the big 8 get back there? Though, despite my bafflement, the entertainment value on this one was quite low, so I’m sticking with meh.
I noticed on rewind that the show cut away from the table at the moment the sugar pile would be shifting from having a coin shoved into it from below.
They could easily have gotten away with three items (even assuming a fair die), since they waited to see what the number was before telling Turtle Guy whether to count going up the column or going down the column. Maybe they could even get it down to two or one if they had other ways to take any number and make it land on the soccer ball while seeming like a natural way to do a random choice.
Also, as noted, since Turtle Guy wasn’t looking at the pad when he chose, the pad could easily have just put up “Japan” no matter what he touched. Or, if they wanted to be less bold, one of ten or so countries – the array of flags could be arranged so that every flag is either one of the prepared country or next to one of them. Since he’s at least sort of looking away (and the magician was moving the pad around), even if he was trying to pay attention, Turtle Guy couldn’t be absolutely sure whether he touched a particular flag or an adjacent one. The pad then displays whichever prepared country is closest to the actual touch and off they go.
I think Denny Corby and John Walton both used math.
Corby had a way to force 83 by making Wallace choose from specific categories in a specific order. He knew all of the combinations that would make up 83.
Walton’s trick was super impressive but I feel like the 8 was forced. He seems like the sort of guy who could take any three numbers from 1-6 and make them equal 8 based on what operations he applied. He also added his own number too didn’t he? He was probably befuddled and giddy that the only operation that needed to be applied was addition.
You may be right about this. I watched again and he definitely didn’t swap in the cards. Chances are the magic number was going to be 8 no matter what and he got quite lucky. If he’d said something like, “Let’s take Alyson’s number, divide it by Penn’s, and then multiply it by Teller’s,” the jig would probably have been up.
I tried to find a video of him doing this trick elsewhere but couldn’t.
(Sorry for the double post.)
I checked YouTube for Denny Corby as well. I didn’t find the restaurant bit, but this trick was pretty impessive. I don’t see any way he could have forced that number. Any thoughts?
How would that work, exactly? We can see in the menu that items have different prices, both within and across categories. And since addition is commutative, it shouldn’t matter in what order the items are chosen.