Comment by dhosek
1 year ago
My favorite of these was a trick where someone picked a card out of a deck and then Teller revealed a large version of that same card in an unexpected area in the vicinity, It turns out that what he had done was hide a complete set of large cards in the area before the trick and memorized the location of every one of them so, e.g., the king of hearts would be at the top of a palm tree, the three of spades under a drink tray, etc.
The best part is that that kind of trick usually becomes more, rather than less, impressive when its inner working is revealed. I recently got to see them perform live, and my favorite trick by far was one of that kind.
Penn only agreed to the "Red Ball" trick after Teller hit on the idea to tell the audience how it works at the start.
https://lasvegasweekly.com/news/2008/nov/20/man-ball-hoop-be...
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/619/transcript
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhnATlPdG6A
Here they are showing how they do ball & cups by using clear cups and it's no less amazing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8osRaFTtgHo
I love these and my kids who are a little obsessed with stage magic right now are at the perfect age for Penn & Teller videos so I need to stash these for the next time I have them. There’s definitely skill levels involved, even at the professional level (and Penn & Teller are definitely among the best out there). We’ve been to two professional magic shows in the last year, one in Wisconsin Dells, the other in Lake Geneva (both venues starring their owners) and it was apparent that the Dells guy was much better than the Lake Geneva guy (although the second magician the Lake Geneva guy had some impressive work to show).
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Watching Teller do the cups and balls trick with transparent cups is mesmerizing.
Yes, you can see everything. No, you still can't follow it.
Sure, you can see that "something changed" after the fact when it is stable. However, Teller is so damn smooth and fast that any active change looks like teleportation.
There was a video of a magic trick I saw where the trick was almost certainly accomplished by false shuffles. I know how to do a few false shuffles, in theory, but, the magician (Ricky Jay, I think?) was just so good at the false shuffles that I was more impressed than if I didn't know how it was done.