theory11 — Magic Tricks & the World's Finest Playing Cards

Alan Rorrison on Fool Us

Infected said:
P&T could have guessed without having to give away the trick like that. They could just have said "are you using a PK".
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I agree, that is the one thing i dislike about Fool Us, they do sometimes give the effects away completely and ruin the illusion for the audience.
 
One thing i disagree with Alan is that he purposely mention which type of jewelry, and with this Penn manage to narrow down the gap of the secret and hint the audience that they can attempt the same trick by using a ring. What kind of ring? Is not hard for them to search in this digital age.
 
Something tells me however that a layperson isn't going to go out and buy one though. And if they do then they can perform some awesome tricks with it. I see Penn and Teller as a way of letting people that aren't magicians see that what they deem the impossible as possible, and that with practice and skill, they could be as good as this. If Fool Us gets more people into magic I think it is a good thing. I am always happy to allow laypeople to show me tricks they learnt as kids or whatever and to show them how it can be improved if i have the time. I know that it is bad that they 'reveal' the trick, but I believe that what they are doing in general is a good thing, and being honest, I'm sure most of us wouldn't really mind if they reveal the trick as long as we get to meet them and hear what they have to say about our work.

We should be supportive of our art, and not secretive. Chances are that for every 50 people that watched it that are laypeople, 1 of them will look it up, and 1 in 150 will buy something to do with magic due to it. Humans are lazy, and as long as they sort of know how its done they're happy. Unless they're magicians in which case we must learn how its done! :-P

Simon_Magic
 
YenLoong said:
One thing i disagree with Alan is that he purposely mention which type of jewelry
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Yeah I thought that was silly. If I was Alan I would of just accepted the comment about jewellery, it was obvious they knew it was the ring.
I did like it though, I've not seen anyone do a matrix in peoples hands like that before.
 
formula said:
Yeah I thought that was silly. If I was Alan I would of just accepted the comment about jewellery, it was obvious they knew it was the ring.
I did like it though, I've not seen anyone do a matrix in peoples hands like that before.
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Hind sight is 20/20. In the heat of the moment, and after Penn's comments, I'm sure he was thinking "So close!" which led to the comment. I think the show and the people on it are really doing their best not to expose anything. It always sounds worse to people who have been doing this for a while because we often just need a "hint" to reverse engineer an effect.
 
I know what you mean. I watched last weeks episode of Dynamo's MagicianImpossible show today and I saw so many things. You can see the actual raven gimmick, you can see people taking/passing/holding things and though I know how to do the majority of the tricks I thought it was a dead giveaway but I was watching it with a friend and his girlfriend...they didn't notice any of the little things I noticed.
So yeah mentioning the ring probably means absolutely nothing to laymen.
 
Well the show isn't about Fooling the audience, it's about Fooling Penn and Teller (Two guys who are in the know and have been for nearly 30 or more years.).

The way they reveal how each guy does his effects really depends on how much respect they have for them. With the Michael Vincent act they had a lot respect for him with the way he performed for them and all, and other times they don't really care too much for other acts and if they know how you did it, they'll just outright say it.
 
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