Sleight of hand magician makes a painful boo boo (you tube video link)
Here’s a great clip of Harry Blackstone doing the halftime show at a football game, and every part of his act manages to get screwed up.
Man, that was pure Spinal Tap, right there.
Looks kind of like “Wayne’s World” meets “Jackass.”
Johnny Carson started as a magician. He told a story about pulling a rabbit out of a pot. the lid to the pot was the trick. The rabbit was loaded into the lid and with the lid on the pot, you twisted the handle and that dropped the bunny.
Works great, except that once, he removed the lid and the rabbit was dead. He grabbed the bunny and shook it so it looked alive and moved on to the next trick.
I’m getting to be a wimp in my old age. I saw that spike, imagined the rest and couldn’t bring myself to watch the clip though to the end.
Ouch! The worst screw-up I ever did on stage involved having a spectator use a magic market to write something on a sheet of blank paper for a mind-reading trick.
Everything was set, the woman was selected, she had the blank paper, the audience was waiting, and I reached into my inside breast pocket of my magican’s jacket for the market, and it wasn’t there. 
Worse, it wasn’t there because it had slipped down the special hole in my pocket :eek: Normally, I could recover from things, but I completely lost it on that one.
Yikes! Watch the second one in the series, where a magician makes the same mistake, but with a volunteer’s hand.
I saw a guy who came to the GT campus, Brian Brushwood and he did a trick with a kitchen knife and four styrofoam cups on a lazy suzan. He stuck the knife with point up and then covered it with a cup, then put the three other cups on the lazy suzan. Spun it vigorously then and then proceeded to crush them one by one without hitting the knife.
The solution is obvious enough I could go and do the trick, or at least what I assume was done, but every time I cringed imagining him f-ing it up and impaling his hand.
– IG
I’ve tried to watch this five times and it just stops about thirty seconds in.
It worked on my home computer last night and just now at work.
Basically, Harry Blackstone was doing a halftime show at a football game and muffing everything. Maybe the problem was having everything be so huge (props, costumes, cast, etc.) and requiring such a large crew to move everything on and off the field.
The first trick has him pulling yards of flag-sized scarf from a hat and then finishing with an oversized rabbit. However, he fumbles the scarf when he tries to place it neatly on an assistant’s tray, so it ends up looking like he pulled the rabbit from a pile of laundry big enough to hide a grown man.
The next flub involved four huge boxes shaped like playing cards that were supposed to burst open in a hail of balloons to reveal four singers. When he waved his hands, the smoke bombs went off, but the boxes didn’t open. Crew members had to sprint on the field to shove them open, nearly knocking down the singers in the process.
Finally, he makes a woman appear from a box in the center of the stage. However, when he finishes his spiel and points to the box, the light inside turns on to reveal that she was climbing up through the bottom of the box and got stuck halfway. He then tries to continue his dance standing in front of the box as if he’s still trying to make her appear (although she’s still completely visible from the other three sides), until she manages to get herself unstuck. The door opens and she staggers out still trying to straighten her costume.