Ace Production…

I’m cleaning out videos from my laptop and found a video from last year’s Abbott’s Magic Get Together. I was hanging out at “the Legion” and some teenagers weren’t familiar with Paul Harris, so I showed them one of my favorite Paul Harris tricks!

It’s such a great ace production, unfortunately I don’t remember the name of it. Here’s a video of Paul doing it on The Magic Palace:

There’s a lot of gold in the Paul Harris books and there’s a rumor of a new one coming out…
-Louie

Old School Vanishing Cage

One thing that you’ll know about me if you’ve read this blog at all is that I’m a Vanishing Birdcage nerd. Last night I was watching a clip of Harry Blackstone Jr. doing the Vanishing Birdcage on the Magic Palace TV show.

Here’s the clip:

There are two things I noticed about just the vanishing birdcage segment. First is this gag where he asks the girl to put her hand on his had and reacts and says, “Isn’t that nice

That gag was probably acceptable at the time that this was recorded, but by modern standards it’s creepy. I hope that if Harry Blackstone Jr. was alive now, he’d be aware enough to drop the bit.

The next thing that I noticed is right after the cage vanishes…listen for it…

Did you hear it?

A kid says, “ouch“. I’m guessing the kid has his fingers between a couple of the bars and got pinched when the cage vanished. I also hope that if he was still alive, he’d change how he did this part of the trick so that there was no way a kid could get hurt. I’m thinking that when this was recorded, an occasional pinched finger was okay.

Look at your magic, what are you doing that may have aged out. Usually the performer is the last person to realize when something in their show has hit its expiration date.
-Louie