cup and balls – MagicShow.Tips

Pete Biro’s Nutty Surpise

Right before I headed to Arizona a couple of weeks ago I came across Pete Biro’s Nutty Surprise at a magic estate sale.

This is a routine where walnuts disappear from you hands and reappear in a covered glass. Then it ends with surprise production of a giant metal nut!
Here’s Pete Biro doing it:

I took the set with my to the fair I was performing at and started playing around with it.

There are some moments in it that I really like and some things that I don’t. I’m not a huge fan of how the large metal nut is hidden. It’s not bad, but it work work for how I work. I also don’t like how the production was from the bag. I changed the load procedure to a body load and load the nut under the glass. I tried two ways of loading the nut, one with the glass covered and one uncovered. I thought the production from the uncovered glass would get a stronger reaction, but it didn’t. The revelation from under the glass while covered was stronger!

I have more ideas with this routine that I want to play with, and this is an interesting set of props that’s worth looking into!

-Louie

Avocado Magic!

One of the things that I wanted to do when I was in Las Vegas to hang out at Magic Live was to go to Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart. Omega Mart is a huge immersive art installation that’s a strange grocery store and you can actually buy the things there. If you explore there are hidden doors that take you to the crazy places!

It’s totally worth a stop in you’re in one of the cities where they have locations. While we were in the store portion of the Omega mart, I saw an avocado purse, this is a realistic avocado that is made of rubber, but is hollow and has a zipper on it.

The magician in me got thinking about what I could do with it. The obvious trick would be to take something out of it, then at the end of the routine it becomes a real avocado! The addition would be to have a zipper on the reel avocado that you peel off at the end then cut open the avocado.

For a routine you open the purse and take out an avocado pit. Do a trick with it, like a one coin routine, with the pit continually reappearing in the avocado purse. Then the finale is it’s a real avocado.

Another idea is you could cut it in half and now you have an avocado shell. You could do multiplying avocados, or use the shell to steal something else.

Hmm…what if you have a paper cup, an plastic knife and an avocado pit. You do a cup and ball routine, ending with the avocado purse. You get the surprise of the avocado appearing, but then you blow it off by revealing it’s a purse and the pit is inside it. Use that moment of surprise to steal the real avocado and switch the purse for the real one. Do another phase, and steal the avocado like a in Tommy Wonder’s cups and balls and produce it again. This time ask them to open it, and they can’t. Offer the plastic knife you’ve been using as a wand to them to cut it open!

I hope this inspires you when you see things that would be good for magic tricks to think of things you can actually do with them and not just that you could do things with them.

-Louie

Table Loading…

I’m excited that my table dice holder that I was 3d printing yesterday turned out and works great! It’s for the final two dice production of my Cee-lo cup and dice routine. Here’s the finished holder:

The holder has a notch in the bottom for my finger to contact the bottom of the dice and then to lift straight up to load them into the cup. Here’s this loading procedure in a test video:

This is way better than loading from the pocket for video! I’m glad I spent the time to make it and wasn’t okay with doing it the way I’ve always done it.