I caught bits of Phenomenon on TV the other day. Phenomenon is a new reality TV series hosted by Criss Angel where they compete not to be an idol, but to be a magician. So as you expect, instead of singing, they perform feats of magic. Whenever I see magic tricks or sleight of hand, I feel the need to figure out how they do what they do. Usually it’s pretty tough because the acts are polished for performance. I suppose that this didn’t happen in Phenomenon because it was fairly obvious how things were done.

The first trick I saw involved a poster in a locked safe, three blondes with paint ball guns, and a wannabe magician in a jumpsuit. The guns were equiped with laser sights, and the blondes were invited, in turn, to shoot the magician with their different colored paints at a position of their discretion. After some forced hilarity of aiming at certain anatomical parts and missing, the magician ended up with three stains on his jumpsuit, and when the poster was revealed; lo-and-behold the splotches were in the exact same spots! Impressive, except that on the highlights, you could see that the laser sight and where the paint ball ended up didn’t match. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out the details of the trick.

The second trick I saw was more clever, provided you didn’t take chemistry. It involved a brunette hiding a beaker of water amidst 7 beakers of hydrochloric acid. After a brief demonstration that HClO₃ was corrosive, the wannabe magician took the brunette’s hand and used his ESP to determine that 5 of the 8 cups were acidic (and dropped a tin foil ball in each to show the reaction). Now he had 3 cups left, and he was going to drink one of them and not melt. After a lot of melodrama that put the onus of his life on the brunette, he drank a cup and…survived! Can you believe that? I could, because if I did this trick, I would’ve just had 8 cups of water and some element within the tin foil that reacts with water! But since this show is shown in America, I suspect that 95% of the audience didn’t catch that, and were AMAZED.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: expose, magic, tv