hot rod force – MagicShow.Tips

Hockey Magic

The other night my wife and I went to a hockey game and it got me thinking about magic with a hockey puck. The nice thing about them is that they can be big, or fairly small depending on the side you have towards the audience. It’s also a really well known thing, at least in the northern hemisphere.

This morning I wrote a bunch of ideas and found one that I kinda like:

You have five different colored hockey pucks on the table. You ask if someone in the audience played hockey or a sport as a kid. Ask them if they remember their number and using that number you count across the pucks back and forth finally ending on one. Let’s say they ended on the green puck.

You then have a prediction that shows they picked the green puck…but then on the back of your puck has their number on the back!

This is simply Phil Smith’s Quinta Force and a nail writer.

Not much to it. It’s a pretty simple and direct trick. You could use any force like PATEO or the Hot Rod Force, but I personally like that with Quinta you can use their jersey number.

-Louie

Prestige Mentalism Trick as an Opener

The show I did last month for school assemblies opened with a flash opener, that’s not really a trick, but something visual and exciting. Then the first actual magic trick in the show is the Prestige trick. This is a mentalism trick where you have 5 numbered cards with different things written on them and someone picks one and what’s written on the back of that number is your force.

Here’s what the trick looks like:

How I’m making the trick work for kids is that I’m building a pattern of the same thing on all of the cards, then shattering the pattern with the revelation of something different. This is basically how a joke is structured, you build an assumption (set up) and then you change that assumption (punchline). This is a structure that kids can understand and that’s why it works.

Another thing that makes this effective is how direct it is for the selection of the item, because the number is a free choice. There’s nothing complicated like with the PATEO force or that feels strange like with the hotrod force. The effect how I do it would lose impact if I had a process heavy force, and it definitely wouldn’t work in the opening spot in the show if I had to use a lot of procedure.

I really dig this trick, it works out great for me.

-Louie

Bigfoot Sightings…

This summer I’m doing a few virtual shows that will be cryptid themed. I’m starting the brainstorming process and I remember seeing Bigfoot Finger Feet. These are little bigfoot feet that go on your fingers. They would work great with a virtual show because you can zoom in on them and make them play big on the screen.

The idea that I came up with that I liked was to have five cards (actually blank drink coasters) with the names of different bigfoot sighting locations. I could show each card and talk about and/or show video of the sighting. I would use the feet to walk over the cards as I talked about the sightings. Then they would pick one. I’d pour water over all of the cards “to make fresh mud for the tracks” and when I do that, bigfoot footprints would appear on the selected location’s card!

From a method standpoint there’s a lot of ways I could force the location. I could use: Quinta, Hotrod Force, Math Number Forces, etc. Then for the reveal, simply using a hydrophobic spray and an stencil would do the trick.

I think using the video element of the sightings adds a lot of production elements to the trick that wouldn’t be in a typical in person library show. The nice thing is the investment for this trick will be about $20 and with showing the short video clips, I can probably get 4-5 mins out of it.

-Louie