Magic Tricks

This is the first of Dan's reanimations of The Tarbell Course in Magic that I've seen, and I was impressed by it. One of the tricks he works with here, "A Psychological Impossibility," is one of the very first tricks that I remember learning and showing my dad when I was just a little boy, and it really bowled him over, since the original handling in the original book is actually pretty darn great itself. But what Dan does with that trick and all of them in this offering is to give them a more modern feel and eliminate the need for things that you can no longer count on people routinely carrying with them, like a pocket handkerchief, etc. I was especially impressed by what he does with the Hindu color changing deck routine, since he gets a big reaction out of that trick from an audience of adults, in part by completely re-imagining what the effect itself is trying to be, and in the process he makes that particular trick play much stronger than it is likely to play today, if you simply used the original handling. So all told, I was very impressed by what Dan brought to this material, and I look forward to seeing what he has come up with, where all the other Tarbell tricks are concerned.