talkmagic.co.uk

Lawrence wrote:

Aza wrote:Ha!

I think i shall adopt the name Da Aza Codé!!

Put on a sh!tty italian accent and I'm golden!

Much love

Aza

Nooooooo. WMS will claim you're copying Jeff McBride!!!!!!!

It's a different "method"

Much love

Aza

I hate to tell Criss Angel this but the walking on water bit was done before his career started. Terrance Stamp did the exact same effect in Superman 2, and then decades later the Mythbusters used the same method to do the illusion.

We can now look forward to a new YT vid from Criss & cohorts, this time threatening The Masked Magician, Superman, Terrence Stamp and The Mythbusters team!

Randy wrote:I hate to tell Criss Angel this but the walking on water bit was done before his career started. Terrance Stamp did the exact same effect in Superman 2, and then decades later the Mythbusters used the same method to do the illusion.

Some guy called Jesus has prior art on this by some way!

Tomo wrote:

Randy wrote:I hate to tell Criss Angel this but the walking on water bit was done before his career started. Terrance Stamp did the exact same effect in Superman 2, and then decades later the Mythbusters used the same method to do the illusion.

Some guy called Jesus has prior art on this by some way!

That was using camera tricks and stooges!

I've been trying to keep out of this sort of thing but...

If you ignore the legal ins and outs to all this there's a deeper question hanging around like a bad smelling elephant in the room. Paul Daniels said at the recent EMC that the one thing lacking from modern magic was belief. I think what he meant by that was that when a magician performs to an audience, the magician knows there's no real magic, the audience knows they're just being fooled by sleight of hand and trick boxes, they clap at the end and that's it. Some performers practically confess part way through their acts that it's sleight of hand by talking about learning the trick or some other such minutae of becoming a magician.

What happened to the days of young healthy Americans pretending to be crippled Chinese mystics both on and off stage in order to maintain their allure? Identical twins claiming to be an only child, the other costumed up when they're out and about.

Maybe it's just because I was young but I'm sure I remember a time when magicians didn't allude to even the presence of a method, when the only explanation they gave was 'magic' and 'magic' meant actual supernatural MAGIC. When the Masked magician first did the rounds the main problem for many people wasn't that he was giving the tricks away, it was that he was showing that they were tricks at all.

When you look at the fast evolution of sawing a woman in half it was entirely driven by a very small number of performers attempting to out do each other, providing and increasingly realistic display of the effect in order to silently suggest that the other wasn't REAL magic and theirs was.

When you consider a claim like "You did it the same way I did it, and that's stealing." (paraphrased, admittedly but still that's what it boils down to) that makes no sense in the eyes of an audience who believe in magic even a tiny bit. Because if it requires some great ability or even if it requires amazing (but totally scientific) skill, why would one person get annoyed at another person who is equally skillful? At that point it's almost like someone saying "I can run really fast and I saw you running really fast and that's MY special power".

When claims like this come around, whether I think they're legitimate or not (Teller's shadow rose effect probably is, this one almost certainly less so) the first thing which comes to my mind is that the public (yes the public, not just us magicians because these things hit the mainstream media too) sees it as magicians, now tricksters, reduced to nothing more than a clever machine; a clever machine they don't want anyone else to have. In an age of technological democracy when there are many initiatives to make technology as free, available and open as possible (Open Source Software and Hardware movements, the One Laptop Per Child movement, Raspberry Pi, Makerbot, GNU and a million others), trying to cling to some technical secret looks (especially when they're both big players) look like the IP slapfight between Apple and Samsung.

It's just... sad.

-Stacy

Well said, Stacy.

I agree with Stacy. Criss Angels vid did make me angry. Moaning about someone else doing a blindfolded drive (didn't David Burglas do that in the 60's?). I think he's just terrified of losing the few fans that remain. Thus trying to turn them away from potential competition. Whilst it's all just drama I can't help but wonder how this will turn out.

Is Criss angel even on tv these days?

Probably not as he's involved full time with the Cirque De Soleil show in Las Vegas.