Mailbag #183
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Do you have an upper limit you would pay for a magic trick? I’m considering picking up Impossible Bottle, but it’s $2500. Do you cap your spending at a certain amount? And would this trick make the cut? I guess maybe I’m looking for someone to talk me out of buying it.—ZD
I don’t have a set limit that I won’t exceed when I buy magic. Generally, I’ll take a chance on anything under, say, $75. Around $75–$250, I need to hear good reviews or have a lot of faith in the person releasing the product. And above $250, it would have to have incredible reviews and a wide variety of uses.
So no, I wouldn’t pay $2500 for this.
Object in bottle is a classically beautiful, impossible effect. Object in my special bottle that I brought with me in this giant bag is a little less romantic.
Remember, you’re not buying 100 times better reactions than you’d get from a $25 trick (as you can tell from the demo). You’re buying an expensive methodology.
I asked two people I was with earlier today how they thought this trick might be done, and both of them independently landed pretty close to the general idea of what’s happening inside that bag. That’s not ideal for such an expensive trick.
For $2500, I’d want all four of these things:
Something that left people with no conceivable idea how it could be done.
Something that wasn’t one Google search away from a product page with a demo video.
Something that could be used to accomplish a variety of effects. (And no, I don’t consider “8-Ball in a Corona Bottle” to be a significantly different effect from “Padlock in a Corona Bottle.”)
Something that felt less puzzle-y.
I’m not saying it’s not strong; it just doesn’t feel especially magical. It feels more like an expensive engineering puzzle.
If you perform professionally, you can potentially justify the expense. But if you don’t, you’re eventually going to become the guy dragging a Corona bottle and a comically oversized paper bag to every barbecue because goddammit, you spent $2500 on this thing and people are going to see it.
Just a thought after your latest post. [The Misfire Principle]
You have talked about this concept in the past but misfire got me thinking about how it could be applied to other potential advantages.
Suspicious magic props always pose a challenge.
What if they fail at what they are “supposed” to accomplish, but benefit you in another way during a demonstration? A ruse to accomplish a different setup to your benefit.
A simple use of Quiver, which is a difficult prop to justify these days.
“Can I borrow a dollar?
Thanks.
I have this weird coin purse that my grandma used to carry all of her Susan B. Anthony dollars in. The problem is that every time I put money in, it ends up disappearing. The exact opposite of what it’s supposed to do! I’ve lost enough already, so I am using yours now.”
Try to affect the vanish of their bill a few times, but it keeps failing and the bill just falls to the table instead of vanishing.
“Weird, I guess it must only happen with my money.”
Give them their bill back.
You have switched out their bill for a known SN/prepared for a completely different effect later on under the guise of failure of this weird thing. —LT
It’s an interesting idea and may have some benefits in certain scenarios, but I think in this case you’re probably putting more emphasis on the purse than might otherwise be there.
You’re openly saying, “This is a special purse,” and you’re openly putting their bill in that purse. Even if you don’t end up using the purse in the effect, I think you’ve already spiked their suspicion.
That’s my perspective, at least. But I don’t find the Quiver purse to be inherently suspicious in the first place. Yes, if you’re carrying it around in your pocket as you go about your day-to-day life, then that’s definitely weird.
But if you’re at home showing someone something and you say, “Okay, I need, like, a small drawstring bag or something,” then leave for a bit, come back with your Quiver, and dump out whatever you keep in there—change, enamel pins, guitar picks, etc.—I don’t think they question the purse. They may not own that exact kind of purse, but everyone has a handful of weird little boxes, bags, and containers around the house that have become the permanent homes for specific categories of crap. If you treat Quiver like one of those, I don’t think it comes across as particularly suspicious.