Don’t know how he did it - I did notice the weird looking seams on the back of his jacket and the sides of his pants, but was still surprised when he pulled his clothes off (and when Teller kissed him on his shoulder!)
I’m fairly certain that step ladder is vitally important to the wedding ring trick. Penn implied that the magician had a mechanism in his suit to move the ring from his hand through his pants and onto the shoe, which was disproved by his dramatic disrobing at the end. I think there is an equivalent mechanism hidden inside the leg of that ladder to transport the ring to his shoe.
I think it’s safe to assume the ring is not actually tied onto his shoelaces - his fingers are covering everything while she supposedly checks the knot, and while he “unties” them (note even Alyson comments how his shoes are tied after the trick, when he is never shown re-tying them) - I think he somehow gets the ring onto a little loop of material that is somehow (magnetically?) attached to his shoe - maybe dropped down his leg via an open-bottomed pocket?
You can see it dangling from his shoelace while he walks over to the ladder, so it seems to be connected fairly well.
Though, at the same time, he seems to be holding the laces strangely while she takes the ring off his shoe.
Personally, I thought that he simply had some elastic going straight from his shoe to the handkerchief, right through mid-air. The ring does seem to appear on the shoe directly after he flicks the handkerchief through the air.
Maybe the difference between directly reeling the ring to the shoe than reeling it through your clothes is a sufficiently large technical difference from a magical standpoint that it wouldn’t be considered the same effect as what Penn described?
I dunno - diamonds are famously “hard”, but that only means scratch resistant, and many have been shattered by a moderate bump - I’d imagine his method has to treat her ring more gently than that.
I agree that it appears to be already attached to his shoe by the time he walks to the ladder.
I wish I had enough time to listen to every podcast, and watch every show and video out there. There have been so many tricks that have perplexed me over the years that I’ve forgotten about which I would have loved to know the real story on, but it would be impossible to catch up now.
For me, I joined the site back in 2015 (during the earliest P&T Fool Us thread) after searching online for possible solutions to tricks. This kind of became my annual retreat to return to every new season. It’s been fun speculating with others here, both amateur and professional alike, even if we are far off the mark. I have no personal experience (obviously) but I’ve been interested in magic my whole life and loved those Masked Magician specials back in the day which exposed so many of the old methods. This has almost been like a modern equivalent.
Anyway, I just caught up on the latest episode, so here’s my quick write-up.
Season 6, Episode 5 - July 15, 2019
Alyson Hannigan started out the show by pointing out the thing about her wearing the same outfit every episode. I remember people mentioning that on these threads before (I’m guessing there are probably reddit threads devoted to this show too, though I never checked).
Adrian Carratala: Ring around the shoelace (fooler). I read the discussion above and agree that the ladder must have played a role somehow (besides being a distraction with the empty box). I thought the breakaway clothing reveal at the end was brilliant showmanship. I like that he purposefully misdirected them and anticipated their folly. (If they had guessed the correct method, it would have been embarrassing.)
Kevin Blake: Cards on rhapsody. Anyone else surprised to hear the rhymes coming out of that guy’s mouth? So since the ending was prerecorded, they were both obviously forced cards (or somehow changed form), but how? Is it one of those “heat” signature things? Penn did mention it was a gutsy thing for him to leave the evidence with them.
Ryan Stock & Amberlynn: “Gross” magic. I really enjoyed their performance and am interested in looking up the world records they hold. Penn says that it’s “all magic,” but I’m not familiar with the methodology here. So it’s not actually a deviated septum/sucking milk up and out your nose thing? And did she have some sort of rig attached to her finger or did she really project milk out of her eye? Penn mentioned that he hammered nails up his nose (is that not a real thing either?) and Teller pulled a bean out of his eye (a popular illusion). I’m fascinated by this distinction between carnie/geek stuff and “real” tricks.
Christopher Castellini: Paraplegic mentalist. I could have sworn someone did this trick on the show a couple of years back. So I’m a little confused at the instructions here: the volunteer was supposed to pick a word that had “at least” 6 letters, but it could have been anything between 1-10 letters? Seems pretty straightforward; a doctored book with “unexpected” on every first line. Could the volunteer have possibly picked a different word?
P&T: Indoor street magic demonstration. So this was really an enlightening (and disillusioning) segment for me since I’ve always wondered about David Blaine, Dynamo and other “man on the street” magic. (Was all the “believe” stuff a direct dig at Criss Angel?) So basically it’s all rehearsed and fake and everyone in shot is a stooge? I want my innocence back. 
I’m going to assume that there’s a missing moment in the footage shown on TV where it might be more clear (they actively remove footage of “the dirty work”, since people can step through frame by frame and crack all the secrets otherwise).
It is true that magic acts generally don’t do anything or have any props that aren’t necessary for the truck to be performed (and this extends even to extra mannerisms like fumbling the cards or coughing, etc.) Everything you see is usually necessary for the performance to succeed.
In this case, though, I’m not strongly leaning towards the idea that the ladder was necessary. I feel like there’s a good chance that its part in the process was to mislead Penn & Teller. The words on the back of his shirt pretty well imply that they picked one of the less impressive (in his opinion) solutions and that he had set up the trick to send them on a wild goose chase in a variety of ways.
I checked out about ten minutes of one on YouTube and it’s basically Penn and some other guys having a chat while, by happenstance, being recorded. Being in a water cooler chat is fun to do. Listening to someone else’s…eh, not my thing.
I don’t know. There are a fair number of cases of people setting up messages to P&T saying “nope” and “wrong”, etc. but those always seemed well-intentioned and playful. To me, this guy just more came across as a cocky a-hole. I suspect that if he comes back to try and beat them again they’ll go double-effort to bust him and make him look bad just because he was a jerk about the whole thing this time.
Some is, some isn’t. Street magic TV specials typically have a mix of “real” genuine performance with other stuff that involves setups and stooges. David Blaine is a genuinely talented magician but he is also notorious for pushing the boundaries of stoogism and camera tricks on his TV specials. Of course, he would argue that that’s just all part of the performance and you use whatever tools the medium affords you to achieve the effect you want.
P&T here are obviously making fun of one end of that spectrum. I thought it was a brilliant act and right up their alley (Ha!). At the end you can see the original camera man quickly duck behind the wall and switch places with Teller. But I have no idea how Teller disappears from the chair.
I happen to know this one due to seeing something I wasn’t supposed to see during a stage magic act I saw once a long time ago.
[spoiler]If you want to figure it out for yourself then I’ll just note that Teller sits real still don’t he!
Google image for Asrah levitation form[/spoiler]
P&T: Indoor street magic demonstration. So this was really an enlightening (and disillusioning) segment for me since I’ve always wondered about David Blaine, Dynamo and other “man on the street” magic. (Was all the “believe” stuff a direct dig at Criss Angel?) So basically it’s all rehearsed and fake and everyone in shot is a stooge? I want my innocence back. 
[/QUOTE]
Definitely not a dig at David Blaine. Penn has stated in the past that he is a big fan of Blaine’s street magic specials from the 90s.
It’s clearly mocking Criss Angel and, to a lesser extent, Dynamo and YouTube magicians.
Angel is pretty infamous for using stooges, setups and camera edits to present his silly tricks, and most magicians have little to no respect for him because of it.
In the ring around the shoelace act you can see that he holds the large silk cloth by the corner and lets it drop down nearly to the floor after he has ‘disappeared’ the ring. I think that’s where the transfer takes place.
In the ‘pick two cards’ trick I think he has used fake shuffles to keep the deck in order and knows the two cards by counting their position in the spread out deck. Obviously he has pre-recorded the closing lyrics. That’s too obvious, he would have been better off rapping out the reveal himself.
David Blaine does cheat on his specials. One example is his levitation trick. He does Balducci Levitation, which allows you to “levitate” only a few inches, for the people on the street but what we see on TV is him being lifted much higher by a harness. He does other tricks which are impossible without the sort of prestaging Penn describes, such as the one where he throws cards at a window and one appears on the other side of the window.
I’ve seen this trick done many times. What baffles me is that nobody ever says “There’s only one word that long” and nobody ever notices that the same word is also on the first line of the facing page.
The part where he talked about words of other lengths was to suggest to the audience that the volunteer had a choice of words. He wanted you to think that the length he asked for was arbitrary, when it wasn’t at all arbitrary.
A lot of the time the audience member is in on the trick to some extent. There’s a bit of an instant stooge effect, and most people won’t want to ruin the act they are now a part of. The magician can also control what the audience member has an opportunity to say to a large extent. Often they’ll give clear instructions, and ask simple questions with short answers. They will have already had you follow instructions a few times before the key moment, so they know if you’re a wiseass, and can change the act if needed.
The trick of course is that the question changes based on which number is selected. For example “choose any word with at least 6 (or 7-10) letters,” or “choose any word with 4 syllables” or “choose the 3rd word” etc.
I wanted to wait for a few episodes to pass, but it turns out I’ve seen all of the P&T final acts before. We were in Las Vegas in March and saw their show the week after they filmed the current season. Every trick they’ve done this season was done live in their stage show.
Has anyone else seen their current live show and can confirm this?
It’s pretty cool to recognize the tricks, but also pretty embarrassing to admit that I am still surprised at the tricks (except the Street Magic, which was pretty weak to begin with).
Did I ever say that Blaine never “cheated” in his early specials? No. I said that David’s early specials are, most likely, not the subject of ridicule of Penn’s funny little sketch.
By the way, every magician that has done any kind of special in the past forty years has “cheated” one way or another. At least, Blaine’s specials got much better with time, see for example: Real or Magic.
Just going through YouTube, before Fool Us came into existence, I once watched through all of their performances that were ever filmed (and put on YouTube). Based on the sheer quantity of repeats, it was clear that there was a specific set of stuff that they had or that they had designated for film (so that they still had material for their live shows).
From interviews I had read, it it sounded like they had a pretty large list of material that they rotated in and out of use in their live show - and are always working on new acts. Though, that said, they would spend years perfecting a routine before adding it into the rotation since they’re perfectionists. From the description, it seemed to be the case that they had more tricks than I had seen by a few times. I saw maybe 8-10 via YouTube? Probably they had established a good 30-40 acts over the years.
But so, Fool Us is now in season 6. They’ve had to do a performance for 68 separate episodes. They have probably had to create more content in the last five years than they needed to in the previous 45+ years, simply due to the format of the show. I assume that they’re under the gun just to keep up.
And, yeah, magic is not an art where you can mix it up and go freestyle, to put a different spin on the same performance. It’s all so technical that you have to do all the same stuff right down to coughing at the right moment in order to do the tricks. Unless you have a bad memory, you’re not going to get a new experience out of a repeat performance.
It is certainly unfortunate that they’ve had to reveal everything on TV and have nothing limited to live shows. However, it is the case that even non-perfectionists have to work pretty laboriously over many months to create even a single act. If you’re having to crank out a dozen a year and the quality of your product is still pretty good, that’s pretty amazing.
And of course, you should compare to other working magicians. Look up, on YouTube, the complete catalogue of Voronin, for example. It’s a good act, but he’s been doing the same one unchanged for a few decades now (and in his live performances).
The world of magic doesn’t seem to work like comedy, where you trash all your content once a year and start building a new routine. People get their act down pat, in their 20s, and largely proceed to do that same act for the rest of their life.
I get the feeling like David Copperfield might have been one of the few people to keep advancing forward his whole career and trying to completely top himself at every step. (Of course, that sort of put him into early retirement.)
But if we put P&T on the scale from Voronin (1) to Copperfield (10), it does seem to be that they’ve always continued to expand their catalogue even if they didn’t always push the boundaries of magic along the way. They’re probably an 8 and that’s pretty commendable.
The book picked was The Great Gatsby. Assuming that “unexpected” was on every page, it wouldn’t be the same book. I read the book a few months ago and if it was me on the stage I might be able to notice that it doesn’t fit the style or storyline of the book. If I did, would I say that it’s not the real book. I probably would go along with it rather than making a scene.
S6E5:
Wedding ring: It’s extremely clear that where he “Drops” her ring into the hanky is nowhere near where the “ring” he gives her to hold is. Pretty sloppy slight on that one, imo, especially in his day in age when anyone worth half their salt knows that move is coming. At that point, it’s just about getting it from his palming to his shoe. Not much for me to say, as there doesn’t seem to be anything to see. It just appears on his shoe in the first shot of his show after he has her “drop” the hanky. Which I am guessing is the misdirection to ensure no one is looking at his shoe. Pretty sure it’s not there in the last wide shot before that. The mention of Ring Flight is a trick very much like this one. Dave Bonsall created one version that seems very well regarded, and to his credit. he actually essentially explains the trick on a promo video for the gimick he sells: http://www.penguinmagic.com/p/4183 - you can see that it’s basically a clip on a reel - so I assume you extend the reel, up the back of your jacket, down your sleeve and perhaps it clips inside the cuff of your jacket until you are ready - than you clip the ring in your hand to it, release it, and it retracts to your back pocket on your keychain.
Penn obviously thinks he built a reel into his shoe and ran the line through his jacket and maybe also his pants in a re-engineered ring flight. They get busted on thinking it goes through his clothes. It COULD be as simply as him not running the line to his clothes. An invisible line straight from the shoe to his hand or the hanky could do it - but he did say they were “far away” from his method… he doesn’t bend down, and the ring clearly appears on his show mid-trick - so he MUST have something that either “reels”/pulls the ring to his shoe, or otherwise transports it.
I just noticed something. Right before it first appears on his show, he prompts applauds - perhaps an audio cover? When he does this, he gathers the hanky with an odd hand-position of his right hand. Then he lays the hanky out suspiciously, then lets it dangle right over his shoe-top. This is almost certainly the moment of truth (that they air from a very wide angle that shows the move but also hides the appearance of the ring - I think they have a rule that they cut out an important move from the airing so the audience doesn’t see the moment the trick occurs). He has some mechanism to transport the ring from his hand, behind the hanky, to his shoe. P&T certainly miss it because in a first viewing, they have no idea the ring will end up on his shoe, so they aren’t looking for a move there. Misdirecting where the ring will end up means P&T are looking in the wrong place, expecting the wrong move - a clever strategy for this particular show. I don’t think the ladder had ANYTHING to do with the mechanism other than allowing him to display his shoe in a more visual manner, and provide more misdirection.
Kevin Blake - I don’t see anything fishy after he moves P&T’s hands, so there must be a force. My first inclination is that when he assures there’s no markings, then does “one more shuffle”, I wondered if he was somehow doing a deck swap. Penn’s card he gets Penn to pick with his finger moving from the left, and Teller picks with him moving from the right - I wonder if it was a deck of identical cards - left half Penn’s card, right half Teller’s. Then with his cardistry during the rap, maybe he swaps it back so they can examine it at the end. And when Penn mentions provers that he WASN’T doing a deck swap or a force - I assume he is inferring that he DID do those things. I just can’t see any instance of where he had the opportunity to do a full deck swap. Those Hindu shuffles might be something that could conceal a partial substitution, but I don’t see how the entire deck could go - he he did give them opportunities to change their cards - and Teller did snap pretty early in the finger moving. I assume it’s somehow a force in this way, but it was very smooth.
Coincidence or not (hint: I think not), Penn’s King of Spaces is the last card in the deck when he initially displays it. The 2H is also in the deck - towards the same end, and there is a separation after it (that he actually widens as he spreads the cards - maybe deliberately?) - perhaps so when he gather’s the cards he can leave a break there and know the locations of those two cards. Rewatching, he gathers the deck with his right index finger crimped in an unnatural position. When he does his first “strip” shuffle, you can see the top card he pulls out of the deck is the 6C - I note was the card right behind the 2H in the deck - to me this confirms he is controlling the location of those two cards. Something is damn fishy to me with that EXTRA shuffle AFTER he lays the cards face down. Why another one? I also get mildly suspicious when he touches Penn’s shoulder, but I don’t see anything he could have been doing there. I don’t see ANYTHING suspicious about his card handling when choosing Penn’s card - he doesn’t use care to return Penn’s first choice to the same spot, but Penn asks for the next card, and he gives him what seems to be the next card with no obvious avenue to swap the card out - no obvious palming or dropping of cards and he doesn’t manipulate Penn’s hand to cover the card where he could have done a swap. If it was just a deck swap or partial deck swap, he’d have no reason to track the location of those two cards in the first place - however he did the force, I’m impressed.
Ryan & Amber - Penn is obviously suggesting that this was done in some magic way, although it seems like some of that stuff could actually just be done practically. I don’t really have any insight on this one. “millimetres close to …” seems to be a verbal clue.
Message in a bottle - I assume this is like one of any number of book tricks where the book is prepared with a bunch of different pages, but they all start with a line where unexpected" is the only long word on the page. The audience member goes along with “it would be a different word, right?” - it is coincidentally 10 letters so it will fit any number - he doesn’t say a word that IS that number long, he he says “at least” that number long.
P&T trick - you can catch a glimpse of Teller adjusting himself in the corner of the shot just before he gets covered. He gets his arms out of the sleeves of the hoodie (you can see when they shroud him that his arms are actually inside the sweater body. I assume the sweater has some wire frame to maintain the human shape after teller jumps out - I assume there’s also a trap door in the floor on the back wall of the set.
Re: P&T doing all their material, that became a risk of the show after a few seasons, but so what? I’m a big fan of theirs, having never seen them live (don’t live near Vegas, and haven’t been in decades). But I have seen most of their TV and online stuff over the years. Most casual fans won’t have seen every episode of Fool Us, and will get something new from their live shows. Most hardcore fans who have seen all of Fool Us like me aren’t going to be that bothered that they know P&T’s routines already. It’s about seeing it live in front of you. I liken it to a concert. I don’t goto a concert to hear new songs I’ve never heard before. I go to hear the music performed live in a way that is unique to that show in that you can’t really appreciate from a recording quite the same way. From a business perspective, This show just gives them added exposure and hopefully sells more live tickets and keeps them popular for longer, adding to their demand in Vegas. But it IS a TV show in season 6 - so I assume even if it did detract from their live shows, they are getting a decent paycheque from this such that it pays even if they do have to use much of their live show in it - banter in this seasons suggests they have been researching and working on new bits just to have stuff for the end performances. I’m sure they will come up with new stuff for their live shows too. One more think to consider, this probably has spurred them to innovate new tricks for both shows (TV/live) that they wouldn’t otherwise have done - so they might still be performing even older stuff but for this show.
The magician has a lot of control and multiple outs.
Maybe on the even numbered pages, it’s the first line of the page, but on the facing odd numbered pages, it’s the 4th line of the page or something, so it’s not obvious. There could be more complicated patterns (page numbers divisible by 3 vs. those divisible by 5 vs. those divisible by 7, etc.) but that’s all semantics.
Similarly, if the woman had chosen “2” as her number, he wouldn’t have said “choose a word with 2 or more letters”. But maybe unexpected is the second number in each of those lines, so if the say “2”, he says "What’s the second word? And he has other outs for numbers from 1-5.
People think “how did he know she was going to pick 6?” when in reality, whatever number she picks, he isn’t obligated to respond the same way because he doesn’t tell the volunteer what to do with that number until he knows what the number is.