Just A Sunday Post #93

Underestimation seem to be a common thing in magic. We tend to underestimate our audience and fellow magicians.

Here is a pretty horrific example of a children's act. I might be wrong and it is okay in a cultural context, but if I were drag my kids to a children's show, this would not be alright with me:



Is silly dancing and a magic effect once in while enough? This was confusing as hell and honestly they way the two acted that vanish of the bottle didn't even need a gimmick. (Yeah right, there was a vanish of a bottle somewhere in there)

This is underestimating the audiences need for proper entertainment. You might argue and say: "Hey, did you hear the reaction? They were killing!" To which I feel the need to at a few points. Maybe the audience knows the two on stage (maybe its a teacher and the principal of the school), that alone would be hilarious and generate proper reactions. Let's assume this is not the case and that the audience have no relation towards the protagonists on stage. Have you ever heard the term: "I couldn't look away, it was like a train wreck." And this is probably what it is. You see those two destroying the credit they have with silly costumes, being all over the place, cheap effects and loud noise. How can you not look at it, if you don't have the option of skipping it.
And that should not be the goal of magic, killing by killing your own prestige. It works, but the audience is smarter than that. Proper audience management and structure would have helped the act. A simple example. When one person does something, the other one must not move at all, as not to draw focus away from the one doing the trick.

But this underestimation goes on. Magicians who do crappy instructional DVD's insulting their target group. Case in point: Randy Wakeman's DVD on the pass.



Aside from the fact that the pass is one of those moves that in concept needs to be embedded in a context, it should not look that bad. My pass sucks, but I can make it look a lot better than those in the videos.

Seriously this is how NOT to do a pass.

And I know Randy Wakeman as a solid magician. So it is sad to post this. But someone needs to tell Randy Wakeman that his "skillz" are not good enough to teach them. He seems to be underestimating the magicians to think this is good enough for them.