Hans Petter Secker: Fortune teller. There should be more tricks done with tarot cards; they’re way more interesting to look at than standard playing cards. Anyway, it’s clear the corresponding cards were forced on top of the pictures somehow, though I think revealing that the rest of the deck was blank may have tipped his hand too far. I watched it again and I’m still not entirely sure how he did it, but Penn mentions Lennart Green and Gemini Twins, for reference.
Xulio Merino: Spongeologist (fooler). I’ve seen P&T perform the cups and balls routine so many times (which seemed to incorporate a lot of the same moves as this), I figured they had this one in the bag. I noticed a lot of the sponge balls were in varying sizes and shapes, so I think they were being squeezed together and pulled apart, but that didn’t make it any less amazing to watch. The act kept going on and on too, which I think really impressed the boys and automatically earned an FU.
Zoe Lafleur: 12-year-old magician. This young lady had such a strong, confident stage presence (which I’ve never had, at any age), so kudos to her. The act looked very clean and transparent to me and stumped me completely. In addition to mentioning gambling techniques (?), the code word seemed to be “crimper,” but I have no idea what that means. P&T can be a bunch of heartless bastards sometimes, but it would be cool if she comes back to perform in the future.
Josh Farley: Crossword puzzle contortionism. I must be feeling very gullible today because all these tricks baffled me. I have no idea where the lady went, how the kid (short panda) got in the box and stuck his hand out the top, or how the lady wound up at the table at the end (replacing the taller panda, who I guess ducked under the table). Penn referred to the dollhouse illusion, which seemingly has the person sitting in back of the box with legs tucked inside the table, which seems like an impossibly tight fit.
Penn & Teller: Juggler vs. magician. I’m not sure if I totally get the point of this trick. Why did Teller get the bigger applause? I’m assuming the audience was signaled to applaud for him or something else was cut out.
Except that Teller was standing next to her, handing her the pens and could have been quietly (for want of a better term) “leading” her with subtle suggestions like “Don’t forget his shirt?”
As to the shspe of his head, if you’re looking straight on at someone through a glass pane and I tell you to draw/trace their features, the shape of their head on the drawing is a pretty forgone conclusion.
This is a variation of what mentalists often do where they have someone draw something that (mostly) matches a prepared drawing.
But I don’t know and was offering a potential solution with the qualifier that I was going by memory with no way to check, so…
[spoiler]I think that the crimping is referring to bending or scratching the card that Penn chooses in some way so that it stands out, visually.
For gambling techniques, I think that there are two:
Card counting. She’s keeping track of how deep the card is, roughly, after Penn inserts it back into the deck and uses that count to move it to roughly where it needs to be for the finale.
Double-dealing. When counting to ten, she pulls off more than 1 card at a time, to dig down and get to the target - which she can see, from the crimp.[/spoiler]
AIUI, pretty much all tricks involving stuffing poles, swords, etc. through a box containing a person are done using a box with a larger interior than apparent to the audience, plus a slender and limber “assistant” (who really does most of the difficult work) moving around inside. If that’s the case here (and I don’t see why it wouldn’t be, though I agree the box is constructed so well that it seems impossible), then the panda switch might be easy to explain: at the start of the trick, the panda DJ is a female assistant who looks and dresses like the one who gets into the box, except that she’s wearing a pull-away panda costume overtop. And also at the start of the trick, there is a panda costume hidden in the box. So when the female assistant gets into the box, besides getting out of the way of the sliding blocks, she also dons the panda costume, ready for the big reveal. Also at the big reveal, the panda DJ momentarily ducks down behind the table and rips off her panda costume.
The Tarot deck trick is very simple with two cards initially on the top and bottom of the otherwise blank deck. Not sure of the exact moves used to get the third card in position.
The sponge balls didn’t seem all that special. I guess the guys couldn’t see his moves so considered that an FU. He did start out using the conventional techniques, but then veered off into new territory.
The little girls card trick was based on cards the would separate into packets if handled right. I believe Penn was talking about a little bit of curl in the cards that separated the packets. You can see her shuffle is just shifting packets around and she’s counting the missing cards in the packets to see what’s been moved and removed. At the end she’s shifting cards around to get the count right. Very impressive.
The crossword puzzle was cute, but underneath just the same as all the other similar (but less creative) box tricks.
Zoe Lafleur: It seems to me there’s a moment where she’s putting the cards back on top of Penn’s card where she briefly hesitates to count the cards she is manipulating, and is caught - Penn & Teller look at each other, and Penn smiles…still a more entertaining and impressive trick than many acts on the show, just unbelievable coming from a 12-year old kid.
She was impressive for a 12 year old. She seemed a little nervous, not even sure she had the right card, but that was some difficult stuff she was doing, card sharp type manipulation that usually takes more years than she’s been alive to master. They better watch out if she does come back.
Part of the trick was cut out so this description needs a little background first. He is only shown dealing 4 cards to Alyson, but if you look closely, he’s actually dealt 5 cards.
So this description is based on that detail.
The first card of the deck is the Magician (Teller card)
The sixth card in the deck is the Star (Penn card)
The bottom card in the deck is the Emperor (Alyson card)
When he starts with Alyson, he never gives her a choice. He just deals 5 cards then places her picture on top of the cards, underneath the original bottom card (Alyson’s).
The original sixth card (Penn’s) is now on top of the deck and the original top card (Teller’s) is on the bottom. The rest of the trick falls into place no matter where they tell him to stop.
I will put this to bed by saying that someone on reddit already did an overlay and they aren’t “kind of the same”. They are basically identical other than the replica was a bit thicker in line weight meaning some gaps in the original were filled in on the replica.
Penn and Teller are the big leagues, and know they are going to end up doing this on TV. They are not going to do a trick that relies on an audience member to follow that kind of cue with that kind of precision. It is absurd to me that you would think they would do a trick with that kind of failure point - all it takes is a notably different choice in face shape and the trick is in the garbage. This is NOT the method. Period. The end.
Marcus Eddie fooled them last night with a clever move. I believe he was holding the deck outside the box, hidden by the open lid when seen head on. Looked very much that way when I saw and I expected the deck to appear in the box, P&T probably didn’t get quite as good a look. My guess is the deck is in an inner box that fits into the outer box that is shown. That outer box is open on the back side. One side of the inner box is white on the outside, when it is held outside the box behind the lid it forms the missing side of the outer box. He just has to push the inner box into the outer box and it looks like a full box of cards.
Kevin Li fooled them but his trick was not impressive. Obviously Alyson is reading the phrases someplace. The cards looked pretty ordinary, he wasn’t palming cards as Penn guessed, he said there was nothing up his sleeve, so maybe the phrases could be seen on displayed on his clothing somehow, or maybe it is even revealed in the drink. Anyway, it doesn’t seem like a good presentation to me, nothing distracts from the basic method of hidden text that the subject reads.
The way in which he holds the cards seems a bit unnatural - my first guess was also that the trick was “optical”, reflecting the back somewhere where Alyson could see it etc.
I also wondered about the drink - why add it to the routine if it serves no purpose at all? - but then again, in the context of the show people do stuff like that just to try and throw P&T off track.
S6E8 Blake & Jana: Penn implied a “conveyor” that “elevated” Alyson’s phone into position - I think you can see him placing her phone behind one of the uprights of the contraption right as Alyson starts to put the 4 envelopes down - he sure would have looked less suspicious if he hadn’t been standing there for a good while WITH HIS FRIGGING HANDS BEHIND HIS BACK, lol…
Another fooler rematch episode. You guys pretty much covered everything relevant already.
Marcus Eddie: Vanishing card deck (fooler).
I watched it again with this in mind, and he definitely holds the box at the beginning in a way that conceals something by the open lid. Even so, it’s still impressive how smooth and flawlessly he pulls it off. The same thing at the end of the trick when he crumples the box; it seems like a shot was cut out of there, because we never saw Alyson hand the deck back to him, but there must have been some sort of careful maneuvering there which I never caught.
Kevin Li: Chinese dictionary (fooler).
That’s my only guess as well, given that Penn threw out Teller’s original answer (I like that he didn’t bother talking in code this time). I also wonder whether the boba drink had anything to do with it, or if anything was being communicated through the metal “reusable” straw (which Alyson mentioned the hole was too small). I agree with TriPolar that the trick generally seems less impressive when you know the participant is in on it in some way.
Blake & Jana: Safe phone. I liked the presentation of this trick. Poor Alyson had to be the guinea pig all episode. “Elevates” and “conveyor” seem to be the words Penn leaned into the most.
I totally missed this the first time around. Yeah, you can definitely see him leaning against the side and put his arm out as she’s placing the envelopes. Very suspicious whenever you can’t see the magician’s hands.
Robert Ramirez: Calculator tricks. Removing the numbers from my phone is the first “trick” I could actually reproduce. I had no idea you could do that. P&T seemed largely unimpressed but I was able to glean enough from his hints that it was all done in-phone.
Funny to see Adam Conover on this show as Adam Ruins Everything basically lifted its schtick from Penn & Teller: Bullshit!
The smartphone calculator trick REALLY didn’t do anything for me - there’s just not a lot of impact to a trick that takes place entirely on a computer screen, which can be controlled in so many ways (manipulating the “in phone” apps, but also with a timed recording, or custom software (perhaps with a helper communicating with the phone), or a combination of the above - in the end, who cares?)
Agreed. While I suspect many modern tricks (especially mentalism) have electronics as key components, any trick that BLATANTLY uses electronics automatically goes in the garbage pile for me. You can make an app do anything. Even if I didn’t know how the calculator trick was done exactly, I’d just say “custom app responds to custom gestures. The end.”
I was certain that trick involved simple lenticular cards; Alyson could see the translation but the audience couldn’t because of the angles. And I think there have been busts on the show before involving such cards. I was surprised that P&T (well, P) dismissed the optical theory of the trick.
Regarding the Chinese word trick, it couldn’t have been more obvious to me that Alyson was in on it. If I’ve learned anything by watching this show, it’s that Alyson does not have a poker face. Any time she assists with a trick, you’ll see her eyes bug out, her jaw drop, or hear some form of “That was AMAZING!” But here, every time her “randomly guessed” word or phrase appeared on the card, she looked utterly bored by it. I was very surprised this one fooled them.
Anca & Lucca: Mind-reading duo. So the conceit of this was to whisper to Teller how the trick is done, do the trick, then see if it fooled them? Unfortunately, no codes were dropped this time, only an understanding that P&T have performed these types of tricks in the past. The whole thing felt very anti-climactic.
Tom Stone: Chest of drawers. Again, P&T dispensed with the secret codewords and elected to determine this using the offstage judges. Am I correct in assuming that the box he held had hidden compartments with both cards and book (which matched the same torn edges Alyson and assistant were holding, which must have been forces)?
Jon & Owen: “The Penn & Teller of juggling.” This was a very showy act with a present element of danger (aren’t they usually warded off from doing this?) which I found fun and exciting. Based on what Penn was suggesting, was there a second mousetrap device with the card preloaded?
Horret Wu: Color-changing cards. The first thing I thought about was photographic development. Is it possible the light did all the “magic” using scientific principles? A cool routine nonetheless.
Teller: Cups and meatballs. Very entertaining twist on a classic, especially when a dog is involved.
No foolers this week, you can always tell when P&T are kinda bored and it rubs off on the viewers.
Two things, not particularly related to the show: I understand that magicians don’t want to give away their secrets, but to me, that should be the payoff. Since it doesn’t happen, I find it hard to get involved. Also, years ago in the late 1980s, I read an article about how among other things, when he wasn’t performing Teller always wore a watch and would carry a ballpoint pen around, stuck between the watchband and his forearm. My brother and I were waiting to see a movie in the lobby of the long gone Biograph theater in Georgetown, Washington D.C. and we saw Teller. Yep, he had the watch with with the pen, just as described. I always wondered, was this so he could say that pen and Teller were inseparable?