talkmagic.co.uk

daleshrimpton wrote:Ive tried to make my own a number of times, and for some reason, i can never get it right.

The funny thing with this baby is, you would think its simple. yet, the weight of the fabric, the stiffneess of the gimick, and the shape of it, all make a big difference.

Its always the most simple of things that cause the biggest challenge.

Well the neatest one I every made wasn't for me but an old chum from the Castle named Steve Becker who wanted to do a Seance like bit in the middle of someone's yard... basically we had a king size bed sheet with all sorts of occult looking symbols drawn (painted) on it and we invited this group of wannabe witches to join hands and stand around the spirit shroud as they called down the cone of power, etc.

Long story short, when that thing stood up there were about a half-dozen teen agers in desperate need of clean undies... they ran away screaming and it would seem, never dabbled in the witchipoo stuff again... which was Steve's goal.

On a recent trip to Hamleys, I glanced past the current selection of Marvin's Magic tricks.

Right there on the shelf was a trick consisting of a haunted hanky and a small pair of spirit slates.

So now I'm wondering whether we should let that particular routine rest in peace for a while?

Pete

pcwells wrote:On a recent trip to Hamleys, I glanced past the current selection of Marvin's Magic tricks.

Right there on the shelf was a trick consisting of a haunted hanky and a small pair of spirit slates.

So now I'm wondering whether we should let that particular routine rest in peace for a while?

Pete

Max Maven actually did the Glorpy & Spirit Slate routine along with a Ruppert's Peril if I recall correctly, on a live national TV show some years back.

Another "similar" bit is on Banachek's PSI Series in which a message appears on a previously blank index card that's been folded into the hank... it's been one of Steve's pet bits for decades!

Yup, the Banachek DVD was my first introduction to the idea of 'spirit writing', and I later saw the same principle at work with Out To Lunch in a Eugene Burger DVD.

My problem is that Marvin's Magic is now marketing pretty much the exact routine to kids. It just leaves me worried that audiences will be more familar with the methods than before.

Then again, I've always been put off using a haunted Hanky because I had one at the age of ten - marketed in the Paul Daniels range. I can't get over the idea that anyone that has had a magic set is familiar with the Glorpy gimmick. Of course I'm wrong, but that's always in my mind somewhere. That and the fact that when I first showed the Haunted hanky to my dad, he dismissed the effect, saying that it just looked like an excited pair of underpants...

Pete

I would agree. I purchased one in a magic shop about 15 years ago, the magician behind the counter was actively promoting it to pretty much everyone that came into the store. Howie the Haunted Hank, if I remember correctly.

Funnily enough, I never saw any use for it (or knew of the term Glorpy) before seeing the excellent Banachek routine mentioned above.

Like anything else though, if used skillfully enough, as part of a wider routine, there's no reason to think it's anything other than real magic.

If you're still having difficulty locating one, Magic Max Inc in Florida sell them, under the Howie Haunted Hank name. The prop is of a decent quality, but the pattern on it isn't perhaps what you might call 'classy'. More like 'Uncle Stan's 60s Hippie Wallpaper'

I was in a discount book store yesterday and they had a beginner's magic book for £1.99 (reduced from £6.99); Glorpy was one of the effects explained, which I thought was quite good considering the price.

Glorpy, like the magic mouse, Svengali decks, etc. were all part of the old midway shuffle & pitch products originally... you'd be surprised at the plethora of such bits that were originally designed for the layman's market as a lure of getting people interested in magic by giving them a cheap, easy to make and/or operate puzzle. Then again, some of these midway bits of merchandise were simply older "out of date" bits such as the Ball & Vase, which most magicians assumed that the laity were a bit "in on" to begin with... that is, when not presented in the hands of a master manipulator... if you ever see John Gaughan work one of these gems... I degress...

As I've pointed out countless times in the past, it really doesn't matter that the public knows the rudiments behind an effect so long as YOU take the time to transform what they think they know, into a true impossibility.

Hobbyists in particular, fear exposure more than the working pros simply because they want to do tricks more than they want to learn how to create enchantment (as Kenton would say). If you take any effect, and most especially those that have become "known" to the public, and work with it, your scripting, misdirection/indirection, etc. you can turn the know it all on their ears and make them believe you are the real thing and not someone using cheap tricks that mimic psi phenomena... learning how to do this is the primary challenge of ALL magic & mystery performers but we must let go of our fear, when it comes to public access to our "secrets" and learn to move beyond what has been shared, even to the point of using the known method in a way that cancels out the possibility that this is what we are doing... I'll refer you to Rick Maue's Book of Haunted Magic pages 54-59

Speaking of Rick's book... you will also find a wonderful Spirit Message routine in there, using business cards and a unique twist to the old paddle move.

We need but think through things and actually earn our title as magical performers, when it comes to such expose' issues. At the same time we need to look at how the availability to our more traditional handling of things hurts magic as a whole... including within our own ranks where anyone with a credit card thinks they have the "right" to know and have access to anything they want and how this has resulted in the wonderful YouTube menagerie of 12 and 14 year old mentalities tipping the inner workings to our hard earned methodologies "just because they can" and the fact that they are bored... idle hands being the devil's tool, as they say.

The moral of the story being that WE need to start curtailing our lust for access as well as the sense of availability when it comes to the tools and secrets of our craft. We can't have it both ways; available and secret at the same time. We can however learn to protect ourselves and what we have learned in overcoming exposure but keeping it very close to the vest.

Save yourself a lot of money.
Buy Karl Fulves book ( about £5. Possibly cheaper if you shop around)
Self Working Handkerchief Magic.
Look up pages 120 to 124..Glorpy

You will NOT need to buy anything.

And it really works. I used it, this year, in a lecture of Impromptu Magic..stuff I'd collected since boyhood and it fooled a lot of the magicians watching.

I did however scrap the spoons levitation & substituted a pen for the fork.

Allen Tipton