Overall, the effects are sound and if you are a seasoned stage performer, you should be able to pull
this off. However, I am not a stage performer, and I haven't had the confidence to try this at my
local happy hour in front of a group of under 10 people.
Lighting is very important for
these effects to work properly, and trying to perform this impromptu at a bar or restaurant is very
risky since you don't really know how the lighting will be. Also, crowd control is important since
there are angle and distance issues to think about.
Yes, the trick is pricey. Is it too
expensive for what you get? Well, if you are a stage mentalist with some experience, then the price
is justified. For an amateur impromptu bar/close-up magician like myself, it's probably a bit too
much, especially since I don't think I will ever feel confident enough to try to pull this off.
The DVD quality is also mediocre since it's just a talking head for the most part. Seeing more
detailed performances would have been more useful so that we could get an idea of how best to
perform these effects and get away with it.
I don't really regret buying the trick since I
was curious how it was done after seeing it performed on AGT. And yes, it was done exactly how I
thought it was, which makes me think others might also be able to guess how it works. I think it
would best be performed quickly, then move on to something else to not give the audience time to
ponder it over.
Hey Ed,
Sorry you had trouble with this. I can assure you it does work reliably if done properly and is very powerful. Lior Manor calls it “the best trick” and performs it in every one of his shows. A famous British mentalist with the initials DB (he doesn’t want people to be able to google his methods) did it every night in his last show and on his last TV special. When David and Leeman did it on America’s Got Talent they got a standing ovation and the youtube version got over 12 million hits. It has been translated into 12 languages and performed thousands if not millions of times all over the world – Cyril did it on a recent Japanese TV special. The 100th Monkey has gotten raves from the best mentalists in the world: Banachek called it “absolutely brilliant” and Richard Osterlind said “Chris Philpott created a whole new area of mentalism with the 100th Monkey,” Colin McLeod called it “utterly baffling” and Max Maven said, “You’re going to want to run with these simian secrets.”
For the effect to work reliably you have to check the light in your performance space before you doing the effect. You can get ready for most performance spaces by printing up more than one set of cards – when we did it on AGT, we brought three, printed in different light levels and slightly different sizes (larger cards makes it easier to see the close up word and so they can be done in dimmer environments). We spent 5 minutes in rehearsal eyeballing it and talking to the director and DP to make sure everything would work perfectly – and it did.
The only other way it can fail is if you’re volunteer has poor eyesight. You can eliminate this possibility by 1) choosing younger volunteers, 2) saying this effect involves reading so you need a person who doesn’t need reading glasses, and/or 3) testing the person’s eyesight with my “Secret Vision Test” which I included as an update. Another strategy is to actively seek someone with bad vision so you can pair them up with someone with good vision – then they can stand side by side and see two completely different things – this makes the effect even stronger!
There are more details on this in the updates and on the Expanded version.
I did not include performance footage on the dvd originally because I’m not a professional performer, but added it as an update and when I made the “expanded” version a few months later. There was always detailed scripting on the written instructional pdf included with the package.
I hope you’ll revisit the effect – if you have questions, I’m not hard to reach. Thanks!
-Chris
I will note that in your spirited, name-dropping defense, that you did not actually address most of the issues raised by this and other reviewers; namely, the risk-factor, the lack of flagging the effect as a stage-only effect, lack of live performances(!), high cost for an optical illusion, the transparency of the method that has several reviewers citing 50/50 results, at best. Also, though you may have brought in several sheets for different lighting situations to prepare for AGT you did not address that this is highly impractical for most performer's situations. I was interested in purchasing the effect but given the negative reviews and your failure in countering them at least to my satisfaction, I think I'll pass.
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Good but hard to pull off
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