Episode 8 "Freaky Body Illusions"

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There are a ton of things taught on the DVD. Like making your thumb travel, stretching your thumb, switching fingers, pulling off your finger, breaking your fingers, pushing your thumb through your ear and so on. All of those don't need any of the supplied gimmicks. So I'm not concentrating my review on them. Just the stuff that you need the props for.

The box can be used to store all the needed props, which is a good thing. The living hand illusion can be set up in there. And you can get rid of the gimmick in there as well. However if you do that you cannot use the box for the twisting the head illusion. I mentioned it in the video, but I feel the need to say it again: The ins and outs are not taught and the suggested order of the tricks do not make it obvious how to get in or out. In fact the suggested order of the tricks make it downright impossible to get rid of a few of the things. I wouldn't mind this fact if this was a product intended for the magic community. This is clearly not. The target audience are kids. And they would have a hard time to figure that shit out.

But I decided to show some of the bits to my core group. My friends. They have seen me succeed and fail with magic many times. I did the levitation, the living hand thing and some of the finger things. The reaction I got was mixed. But one thing was very apparent. It is highly entertaining. The finger stuff was a good opener, the hand thing was a solid piece of funny, but not a convincing piece of magic. And the levitation, well they had no clue, save for the fact that I really didn't levitate.  One said: "It looks like you float, looks like and illusion" Looks like an illusion means it doesn't look like the real thing.

The second group was the "stranger" group. All see me doing magic for the first time. In this case I have tried it for a few different audiences. Kids, adults and a mixture of both. I started with the finger tricks, which in every case got nice reactions, but far from a magical experience. The hand thing got a strong reaction from the kids and initally from the adults as well. However the later group really understood it as a gag and not as a magical thing. The mix group was the weirdest. The adults had more fun enjoying the kids reactions than anything else. I didn't do the levitation thing, as the setup of the show didn't allow for that.

And the third group was a formal booking. I felt weird doing anything with the green gloves, so I didn't do it. I did the finger thing as "my personal warm up" and there it went great. I did the neck breaker and then actually did the head twister to "fix" the break. It went okay, but I'm used to much stronger reactions.

Watch the demo:


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I really think that for a product for kids this spoils way too much. I especially don't like the fact that the third hand gimmick is exposed like that. I think that this is a really good principle if used sparingly. Then again the thumb tip is over exposed and pros still use it. But it makes life harder than it has to be.

So this is certainly nothing for a professional magician. For an amateur maybe, as he gets a lot of material which if you really put thought into this can be used to enhance existing routines. I don't recommend it, unless you have money to burn and some kids who would love it.