Magic Tricks

TITLE: Smiling Assassin by Meir Yedid

Effect: A spectator picks a card from a deck with smiley faces on it's back. The card is then placed into the center of the deck. The magician then hands a small gun to the spectator and tells them to take aim at the smiley face and pull the trigger. A loud bang goes off. The magician then goes through the cards and it turns out that one card is different...it's no longer smiling, but instead is frowning with "x" marks for it's eyes. It also has what looks like a bloody hole in the center of it's forehead.

Price: $25.00

Teaching: This trick is VERY simple to learn and perform. You could create more advanced handling yourself with different shuffles, cuts, and forces, but the basic version that is taught in the instructions seems to work really well. The instructions that come with the trick are well written and illustrated. I was performing the trick in no time after going through the written instructions. There is also a Penguin learning video that you get access to if you buy it from Penguin. Oz teaches you a slightly different version of the trick that I personally don't like quite as much, but it's still good teaching. Overall, I think the trick is really easy to learn and the teaching aids provided via video and printed material are great.

Quality of materials: The quality of the product is great. The deck looks really cool with the smiley faces, and they fit really well with the patter that they suggest about how some people really just don't like smiley faces. The cards with the hole in them are VERY nice. There are four of them, so you can do the trick a few times without really having to worry about someone possibly seeing the same card again. Not only are the backs perfectly printed, the hole on the card actually has some burn marks around it to make it seem even more like a bullet penetrated the card. The small cap gun that is included is actually pretty nice looking, as well. From reading the PO forum, there are three different versions of the gun that you can get. I got one that looks like an old flintlock pistol from a pirate movie. I think it actually looks pretty good, and it gets good laughs when you pull it out and hand it to someone. The ONLY problem with the overall quality of the product is the caps that are supplied aren't very nice. I couldn't get them to fire on the gun, however, when I purchase some other caps from the store they worked fine....so it's not the gun, just the caps. I even like the box that the cards come in. It has a clear front so you can clearly see the smiley face deck.

Difficulty: As I stated earlier, the trick is EXTREMELY easy to do. With a basic force just about anyone could do it, however, it would also be able to be done with any number of forces, so if you have some false shuffles and some more eye pleasing forces, then you could obviously do those as well. I've performed the trick a few times and I only use the very basic handling given in the written instructions, and it's very easy to do that way. But it still gets good reactions.

Applications: This would be a great trick for most close up work. I think if you modified it slightly it would be good for restaurant work. You wouldn't want to use the caps for restaurant work, but you could just use the gun without the caps, or if you didn't feel comfortable using the gun at all you could always just have the specs use their fingers as a gun. Being a card trick it's obviously not set up well for stage work without some kind of video system, but I would think that it would go over well with a large audience so if you have that type of system so that an audience can watch a card trick, I think it would work well. It's a good trick to put into a routine where you are doing some comedy, because it seems to make people laugh.

In Closing: I really like this trick. It's one of those tricks that when I saw the demo video on Penguin I knew instantly how it was done but I was still really entertained by it. I like performing it because it's a trick that can get your specs involved and it also seems to generate some really good laughs. People seem to really get a kick out of it. Overall, I've been really happy with the effect.