The greatest enemy of the magician is exposure.
Such a simple act of “It’s in your other hand” or “You switched the cards” can bring a top performance to an anticlimactic end.
You’d think then, that ‘instruction’ videos constructed by mischevious 13 year olds who barely know how to hold a deck of cards could damage magic beyond repair.
The world famous video sharing website, Youtube, has hundreds of such videos. Their grainy, shaky frames exposing the secrets behind a shocking amount of card tricks which normally cost upwards of £20 each.
So Why do magicians still buy magic tricks, when they can find out the ’secret’ for free?
Well, as all good magicians know, there’s a whole lot more to a magic trick than it’s workings. As these squeaky pubescent amateur meddlers show in theirweak videos, the physical moves alone don’t make for an entertaining performance. There is so much more to magic than tricking people.
The exception to this rule perhaps is the occasional ’street magician’ who makes it to TV such as Dynamo. He can’t put a sentence together, never mind a performance. His ’success’ is more to do with marketing, and a ‘hip-hip’ selling point than competence as a magician, but that’s irrelevant.
Back to the point, when you buy a magic DVD, you get a range of routines taught by an experienced, competent magician. You get bonus handlings etc.
Any magician worth his salt wants to improve his routine and polish it to it’s finest, not learn 50-odd tricks and half-perform them.
The other argument many might have is “Won’t laypeople go on the internet and find out how tricks are done?”
The simple answer to this question is how many laypeople do you actually know who have done this? Anyone?
