Two other little things I noticed: He takes the ring from the spectator while they’re on the floor rather than on stage, he turns his back to the audience/P&T and seems to be doing something with the ring/hanky as they walk back onto the stage.
He doesn’t hand them the belt when giving them the tearaway suit to examine, just leaves it with Alysson.
Penn’s explicit guess was that the ring went through his clothes. There was a fooler who did a somewhat similar trick years ago who made a correct prediction written on a piece of paper appear in his shoe and P&T guessed that he sent the paper through the clothes but the magician got the paper into is shoe from below via a hole in the shoe.
Well, my guess is that the cards really were a fair choice; but he manages to read them somehow and get the info to his sound guy. Then, his sound guy just has to look at the hundred and four MP3s that Blake pre-recorded, and play Penn3Hearts.mp3, and TellerJackClubs.mp3 (or whatever the actual cards were; I don’t remember).
I’m less sure about how he read the cards; I wonder if there’s something in the table than can sense cards, as the chosen cards are held in a particular spot flush against the table for a longish time with no other cards around. The table could then transmit info directly to sound guy. Which makes sense; if Blake himself knew which cards P& T actually had, why not give the rap himself instead of playing the pre-recorded one?
Think at that point the ring in in the cloth, at the bottom corner that falls to his shoe top, the ring is tied to a piece of shoe lace, attached to a piece of steel. As it comes in proximity to his shoe it is attracted to a magnet.
Because of glints of light on his shoe it’s hard to tell exactly when the ring is put there, but it is clearly after that point and before he approaches the ladder. So the ladder is entirely misdirection.
Jimmy Ichihana: Exact card cutting. Lots of moves here, too many to pin down, but impressive to watch one after the other. I thought Penn’s reasoning was a bit of a cop-out, but apparently it all came down to “techniques” and “organization.”
Sebastien Dethise: Herbert and Alyson the Duck (vaudeville-style routine). I’ve got to say, that’s one talented and well-trained duck! According to Penn, there was a “pair of ducks” (one real, one not so much), but I watched the ending reveal a couple of times and I still have no idea where the fuck the duck came from.
Eric Samuels: Liar Magician (mentalist). Penn’s explanation was simple enough that even I could understand it. There were 5 hidden (camouflaged) cards at the top of the board which adhered to the cards he stuck on top of them, and then he carefully turned both over to unveil TRUTH.
Rabby Yang: Rubik’s squares (fooler). No clue how this was done, but then again I could never solve one of those cubes either. I thought an earpiece/backstage assistant would have been too obvious; I would have loved to know what Penn’s own personal guess was. (Maybe he’ll reveal it on his Sunday School podcast?)
Teller: Trace the face. Nice clean illusion, any idea how it was done? Double-paned glass?
Lift Off to Love (mentioned by Penn in the duck trick commentary) with a 68-year old Teller is pretty damn impressive, even with the concession that he doesn’t wiggle his actual legs out the prop while upside down like he used to.
I thought that the fooler act of the last episode (Rabby Yang) was the least impressive of the day.
Thing is Alyson is never really changing the structure of the cube, he just told her to turn it around as she wishes, so there are literally just six possibilities which he of course knows by heart because he himself has prearranged the cube. So the only thing he needs is some kind of a gyroscope, or whatever the name is for the device which keeps track of an orientation using sheer gravity, and some electronic means to get this information. He only needs to know which of the six sides is facing up at the moment.
I think it would be enough for Penn to mention “the gravity of the situation” or something like that to let the guy know he didn’t fool them.
I didn’t tape it so I can’t check, but my impression was that the face on the unbroken piece at the end looked different thant the one the woman drew (that was subsequently broken). Specifically, the right ear seemed more pronounced on the second glass leading me to think that it was pre-prepared to “sort of” match a general outline of a face that Teller would pick a close audience member match for.
He could expect that the woman’s drawing would follow a general outline but I have no idea how he got her signature on it.
I was actually considering the physical mechanism that plots the X-Y position of the pen point. My first thought was about a cumbersome mechanical device*, although, with the state of electronics today I suppose something much smaller is not only possible but likely.
*= An image search shows many such.
He even reiterates that he’s only telling her to rotate it just before he does the big board solving, he actually shows us what he told her to do. As further proof, you can clearly see one of the patterns on the cube before he gives it to her is the same as the second pattern she shows.
I would just adapt a 3D printer to work sideways. The tricky bit is just changing the head. That would probably explain why Teller doesn’t allow access to more than one color of pen at a time - and isn’t in a hurry to switch over.
As I’m pretty sure I noted on this forum, it’s FAR to coincidental if it’s a free choice that those are the exact cards bookending the span he collects elsewhere in the trick. I can’t believe it’s a free choice.
I think you’re confusing two statements. There are two ducks, imo - one doing the boxwork and one always waiting in the briefcase for the final reveal.
As for the comment about two things on stage seeming the same but being different, I don’t think Penn meant the ducks. He said the trick relys on the audience assuming a second thing is identical to the first one he shows the audience. I assume Penn means the two boxes - He shows box 1 to have a hollow bottom when he holds it up; I suspect box 2 where he puts the duck and it vanishes is gimicked in some way to allow him to fold it up and contain the duck in a secret compartment of some sort, and thus not the same as box 1 as the audience assumes.
This is a great catch. I totally misunderstood (and maybe that confuses most spectators) - I understood she was asked to manipulate the faces, not just rotate the cube. That really limits the impressiveness.
Still, skill or not, I didn’t find this trick to actually be very entertaining in terms of performance regardless of the magic.
There’s absolutely no way it’s this. There is zero way to tell what she will use green or pink for - or that she would have drawn clothes over his body, or what shape she’d do his head or that she’d add pupils to the drawing.
This simply is NOT a way they would have done this trick. Impossible.
It is an interesting point. He does an example for her of what he means by “turn it” behind his back - which we can’t see - so it is quite possible for him to have made it explicit to her that he meant full turns of the cube whole the audience was given to understand it to be something else based on their expectations and the ambiguity of his words allowing them to go down the wrong path.
Otherwise, yeah, I would probably have to go with…
Frickin’ gyroscopes!
I’d be curious, for anyone who listens to Penn’s podcast, whether he guessed correctly.