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i watched the first episode of fool us tonight on youtube. On this episode one of the performers did an effect where he had 4 brown bags each with a block of wood in, one of those blocks having a spike in them, he then asked a young lady to choose which ones they would smash their hands on.....


before performing the trick he said people had done this and got it wrong and that there were videos of such failures on the net, now being quite naive i assumed this was nonsense and it wasnt until jonathan ross n penn confirmed it that i thought id check it out.....sure enough there was a video straight away of a man performing the same trick, and getting a spike through the hand on live T.V.

now my question is, do these people who end up with a spike through the hand, have genuinely NO idea where the spike is and are just trying to achieve a miracle?? or are they actually going by some sort of method and its just gone pete tong???

There's a few vids on youtube that are stunts, plainly fakes where it appears they've been impaled. As for the others... well who knows?

I have seen one of these go wrong in person, there's a thread about it here. In this instance it was a case of a gimmicked effect going wrong... I'm yet to quite understand how he got it wrong but themagicwand and I were sat but feet away from the performer in question and both knew he had the wrong cup/cone thing and assumed he was going for a last-gasp change of heart thing where he'd change his mind and slap down on another cup/cone thing. But he didn't. There was lots of blood. I'm trying not to LOL as I type this.

well im not sure if i can post a link here to the ones ive seen, ones a brief clip from an E4 documentary and one of the magicians shown had womans under his own when he slammed it on the spike, nast sod didnt even apologise apparently!!! lol

and another one i saw there must have been a commando kife or something underneath it, you could see the horror in the spectators eyes as the chap put his hand over this bag, he was blindfolded aswell....his hand came crashing down and the nxt thing you know he's flicking blood everywhere......... i just dont understand how anyone could put themselves in that position!!

Short thread on this here.

This is a terrible thing to happen to someone.

Personally I think any magic trick which could result in this sort of serious injury
should be left well alone.
No matter how good you are at your job, things can still go badly wrong.
It's just not worth it.

CArl...

CArlight1958 wrote:This is a terrible thing to happen to someone.

Personally I think any magic trick which could result in this sort of serious injury
should be left well alone.
No matter how good you are at your job, things can still go badly wrong.
It's just not worth it.

CArl...

That's why Richie Smith invented "The Safety Net"
http://www.rtsmagic.com/page24.html


The effect looks exactly the same with 0% chance of anybody getting hurt

mrz0mbie wrote: 0% chance of anybody getting hurt

They said the Titanic was unsinkable.

0% chance is never enough for me, but then these effects are not really suitable for close up so I am unlikely to use them anyway.

Argh!!!!! That trailer shows a spectator being stabbed. Arrggghhh!

How morally vacant must you be to put a spectator in any form of danger? I hope she bankrupted him.

me_simon wrote:Argh!!!!! That trailer shows a spectator being stabbed. Arrggghhh!

How morally vacant must you be to put a spectator in any form of danger? I hope she bankrupted him.

Agree 100%. Probably had no insurance either...

I would never perform this effect, no matter how much someone tried to convince me it was safe.

I know magicians who have stabbed themselves because they thought they knew where the spike was. I even know one who did, but unknown to them, at the last minute the spectator changed things around again, (magician was wearing a blindfold). But I've never seen anyone injure a spectator doing this effect. I hope the magician in question got sued big time.

The version you saw on Penn and Teller is one million percent safe , and tat's even taking into account that the performance for the show was not the usual method. There is absolutely no chance at all that you can hurt yourself, Jon Allen really has done a great job with that routine. It's called "The Pain Game"

When this sort of effect goes wrong it can only be put down to a momentary lapse of concentration. To use a spectator's hand is plain ludicrious. I have performed this countless times on stage using Oulaw's Scorpion and the method I use is a variation on the standard one using a gimmick which is unsusupected.

The impression I got from Jon Allen's performance was that his was 100% safe which is how it should be. But any version where there is a spike under a cup and stabage can occur then, if you must perform it, use your own hand!

C.L.Ward wrote:well im not sure if i can post a link here to the ones ive seen, ones a brief clip from an E4 documentary and one of the magicians shown had womans under his own when he slammed it on the spike, nast sod didnt even apologise apparently!!! lol
!

Ah.. best not post a link to that. Both parties have had to suffer comments, and to be honest he was very shocked about the whole thing. And hes not a nasty sod.. hes quite lovely.

The reason people get the thing wrong.... At the end of the routine there is a 50/50 choice.

your brain is saying its the one on the left, so you want to squash the one on the right. Unfortunatly , the pressure of performing, & Dyslexia can kick in, and you squash the one your thinking about. IE the one on the left... where the spike is.

Jons routine takes this away.

99% of the others out there dont, which is why i will always say Dont do this effect. Human error is the biggest flaw in it, and your bound to get it wrong one day.