I really enjoyed this dvd, lots of great material.But I am against the promotion of drugs.I do not
appreciate all the drug references in this dvd. I mean seriously?! turning coke into cocaine!? And
kush on his baseball cap! As a responsible parent and guardian I do not feel like this DVD is
appropriate for the youth age nowadays.
3 of 6 magicians found this helpful.
The first thing I want to address is the way the video itself is presented. There is nothing spoken
at all, ever. There are printed instructions on the screen from time to time, but the soundtrack is
a repetitive bit of music that, for me, quickly became annoying. So you can watch the video with the
sound muted. You will not miss anything relevant to the tricks.
You get six tricks:
(1)
A plastic straw instantly penetrates a sealed plastic bottle.
(2) An elastic band seems to be
thrown onto the back of a baseball cap, ending up around the linked plastic bits used to adjust the
cap.
(3) A cup from which someone was drinking through a clear straw (allowing a clear view that
liquid was flowing) is shown to have no liquid at all or to have completely dry powder.
(4) A
baseball cap is placed over a deck, and cards shoot from the deck.
(5) A signed card is torn and
then restored.
(6) A card attached to the back of a baseball cap is changed--even though the
card is later shown to be locked between the two adjustment straps.
So those are the
effects, and you'll notice that several of them involve baseball caps. There is a significant issue
here of whether you'll use any of these. If you frequently wear a baseball cap while performing,
then maybe. However, even in that case, you cannot do all of the effects in one performance. They're
simply not compatible.
Here are my assessments of the effects, using the numbers above.
(1) The bottle penetration looks great, and the way it's done is quite creative. I am concerned
that the trailer is a bit misleading here. The straw in the bottle can be immediately displayed, but
it cannot immediately be held out for inspection. Nor, for that matter, can the bottle with the
straw in it. Both of these shortcomings can be overcome, though. The trick requires preparation, and
it cannot be performed with a borrowed bottle. (That's true of most bottle-penetration effects I've
seen, though.)
(2) The elastic band around the straps of the baseball cap looks great, and
you end clean. The hat cannot be inspected, but the effect sure looks as if you've caused a solid
rubber band to wrap around a completely sealed pair of straps.
(3) This trick cannot be
done impromptu, and everything, from the straw to the liquid to the cup to whatever is left in the
cup must be ready long before the trick is done. Drinking cola from a cup, removing the lid, and
showing that the cup contains sugar, flour, or orange soda is pretty impressive, though.
(4) I truly dislike this effect. It does not look at all like magic to me. Rather, it looks as
if a hat has somehow been rigged to make cards shoot out of it. Spectators may not know how the hat
has been rigged, but they'll know that it has.
(5) The torn-and-restored card is a good
effect. It is done on the top of a deck, but there were two problems for me. First, Daniel Garcia's
Torn does essentially the same thing. (That effect is credited, by the way.) Second, I'm not
convinced that the effect works too close up.
(6) The effect seems good. As I don't wear a
baseball cap, though, I wasn't all that interested and did not try it.
All of the effects
here require set-up or gimmicks that you must make. I was impressed by the creativity that went into
thinking the gimmicks up, but that should not be the criterion for buying a trick. In other words,
you generally buy tricks so you can perform them, not just to admire the creators' cleverness. For
me, the effects I'm most likely to use--the straw through the bottle and the torn-and-restored
card--are just variations on effects that have been around for a while.
The DVD could
benefit from a great more instruction. While the preparation of the gimmicks is clear, issues of
performance are given thoroughly inadequate treatment. For example, the torn-and-restored effect
utilizes a "writst [sic] kill." While the video shows the wrist kill, there is no real explanation,
and someone unfamiliar with the term might not know what exactly a wrist kill is used for, either
here or in general. Similarly, the method for ending clean with the bottle presentation is very
badly presented, and there is no video of a full performance.
There are nice touches,
including the presentation of the basic idea behind each effect and credits to previous creators for
their ideas, but overall, I found the effects and the presentation underwhelming.