Mona Lisa's Secret by Card Shark

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Mona Lisa's Secret by Card Shark

Postby Mandrake » Mar 12th, '08, 12:06



Mona Lisa's Secret by Card Shark

The Effect/What it says on the tin
You show your spectators several masterpieces of art printed on playing cards. One of the paintings is the famous Mona Lisa. After showing all four paintings, you point out, that one of the paintings is a forgery. When you show Mona Lisa a second time, she is suddenly holding a Bicycle® playing card in her hand. Turning the card around, the spectators are surprised to see Mona Lisa painted from behind. She has to be the fake! But that is not all, imagine the shock when Mona Lisa reveals she is holding the same card a spectator has previously chosen!

Cost
£17.00 from www.cards4magic.co.uk
£15.99 from www.worldmagicshop.co.uk (there's a demo vid there to show the routine)
€24.50 or $28.00 from www.card-shark.de
and no doubt from many other places as well - search around for deals.

Difficulty
Only just over a 2 as there’s one easy sleight and one move but nothing knuckle busting.

(1=easy to do, 2=No sleights, but not so easy, 3=Some sleights used,
4=Advanced sleights used, 5=Suitable for experienced magicians only)

Review
I first saw this at Blackpool last year and since them of course, Christian Schenk has produced and released all those lovely Vintage cards, Medieval Tarot cards with oodles of gaffs, specials and accessories to go with them. The key word in all of these products is high quality art, design and printing, and Mona Lisa’s Secret is no exception. The card stock has that luxury feel just like Bicycle cards, the quality of the art is wonderful and the printing is excellent. What you actually hold are miniature masterpieces of known works of art and all this makes you forget it’s a routine with cards. The effect works exactly as described above, the magic biz involves one easy move and a D/L, the rest is story telling.

Overall
Not a self worker but oh so close, even a card klutz like me can perform the move and the D/L so nothing challenging at all. You need to provide a deck of standard Bikes, red or blue backs are accommodated, and with all the bits and pieces supplied, you can reveal three different cards. Christian even includes some notes and comments about the different pieces of art used so you can patter on like an expert and you can easily do a bit of web surfing to add to these notes. One version of this uses a picture of the Tweety Pie cartoon character, the other uses a child’s painting of a lion. The working is identical, just a change of image for various reasons and, to be honest, I rather like the lion picture and it’ll be presented as a very early Rembrandt or something like that!

Rating: 9/10
Art lovers would easily rate this at 10 just for the cards themselves!

Value for Money
9/10. A very nice packet trick with cards which isn’t a card trick – although it is. If you see what I mean.

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Postby Replicant » Mar 12th, '08, 13:12

Cute. I particularly like the Tweety Pie portrait; must be worth millions, that. :wink:

I'm probably not the only one to have worked out how this works from watching the video (with the slightly clumsy handling), but I like this one. At least it's an original way to make a card revelation.

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Postby Replicant » Mar 13th, '08, 13:30

There's also a good demo video here...

http://www.card-shark.de/wmv/MonaLisain ... rmance.wmv

The actual performance starts about 50 seconds in.

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Postby Card-Shark » Mar 28th, '08, 11:43

Thanks for telling me that I did a clumsy handling... ;)

OK, you are right, but I try to get better. That video was shot more than 15 months ago.

Actually there are two versions of Mona Lisa´s Secret available. I thought for the US market it would be better (for me) not to send Tweety bird with the effect. So I have an alternate version with a kid´s painted lion (as an early masterpiece) that is also cute. The TV performance shows the lion version I think, the video in the german section of my web shop shows the Tweety version.

Christian

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Postby Stephen Ward » Mar 28th, '08, 11:51

Wow! just seen your new site shark! The online design system is just what i needed. Now i need a few days to get my dark and weird ideas ready for the cards.

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Postby Card-Shark » Mar 28th, '08, 12:30

take your time because: new things are to come soon!!!

there will be a new trick out there called 4 card surprise. And Peter Eggink´s Lottery card. And you can have your own Bicycle style Poker deck with your own back design, minimum quantity: 1!!!

And a sneak preview for my upcoming old poker deck with french faces.

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Postby Replicant » Mar 28th, '08, 16:53

Card-Shark wrote:Thanks for telling me that I did a clumsy handling... ;)

OK, you are right, but I try to get better. That video was shot more than 15 months ago...


:oops:

Your handling is still probably better than mine will ever be! Anyway, we all get better with practice and it's a constant learning curve, eh? :wink:

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Postby Card-Shark » Mar 28th, '08, 17:25

you do not have to find words, I have eyes in my head and am critical enough with myself. ;)

You will not believe that I am into magic only for about 3 and a half years now. And this is how my performance looked 15 months ago. My learning curve still looks upward ;) so I have no problems with these open words.

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