Magic Tricks

This suffers from trying to be a lot of things and failing to be any of them. If it were a retrospective on Franz's career and stories about working with a laundry list of celebrities, it might have been interesting. If it were just a backstage look at a huge illusion show, it might have been interesting. If it were an engineering seminar or a tutorial on video editing or graphic design, even that could have been interesting. Instead, it touches on all these things, but then shifts directions constantly. The backstage video is muddy and doesn't really tell you anything that isn't already obvious (i.e., people who wear different outfits during the show have to change their costumes backstage). Instead of giving any insights into how to conceptualize large scale illusions, Franz brags that he made a car appear when he was a teenager and parlayed that into working with Michael Jackson at 21, then tells you to study engineering and psychology, and transitions int YouTube videos of people ripping off his illusions and encouraging you to report any such people to his Facebook page. Along the way, he puts some of his assistants and an audience member on the spot, asking them to describe their onstage personas in relation to amalgams of known actors and characters (he describes himself as part Tom Hanks, part Iron Man, part Willy Wonka, and part Doc Brown), which is awkward to watch as they struggle to give answers that aren't to his liking (e.g., "the awkward guy in the office" is not a known movie character). It ends with a pitch reel for a magic theme... park? Restaurant? Ride? I'm not exactly sure. Overall, it was nearly three hours that included a few interesting anecdotes that I would have appreciated more in a free podcast interview than a $30 lecture.