How Do You Solve A Problem Like Masuda?
/So, did you come up with any good ideas for Liberty Vanish? Yeah, me neither. It might be one of those tricks that is just a fun visual and you can't do anything that's really going to stick with someone past the momentary shock.
If someone was to force me to use it (which seems pretty unlikely) here's what I'd do with it.
You may have to modify the gimmick to do what I suggest, but I think it's possible. First I'd make a copy of the gimmicked postcard with the statue vanished. Then I'd print up a bunch of postcards with that as the actual image. Then I'd lop off the bottom 25% of the gimmick (making any necessary adjustments to the gimmick to make this workable). And I'd set the whole thing up out-to-lunch style on top of some other postcards I'll mention below. What we want to do is take advantage of their suspicion of the card by expanding it to suspicion of an entire stack of cards. You'll see.
So your friend Bob comes over. You say, "Oh, I want to show you something I got at this weird garage sale." You show him a stack of postcards rubber-banded together. You flick through the edges and he briefly sees a bunch of different locales. "Here's the weird thing," you say. You grab a marker and have him put his name or a mark at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty postcard. Then you make the statue vanish. What does he think? He thinks it's a tricky postcard, but more than that, he probably suspects the whole stack. Good.
You take the rubber-band off and immediately spread through the postcards face down. They all have some cryptic message on the back. "See you soon," (or cryptic-ier words to that effect). You hand him half the postcards and when he looks at the faces he sees that all of them are missing their central figure. A postcard of Egypt with the pyramids gone. A postcard from Brazil where Christ the Redeemer is not on his pedestal. Mt. Rushmore with no faces. (You'd have to make these in photoshop.)
At this point you cull the gimmicked card under the spread of cards you hold. You continue to spread through and once you get to the bottom one (which would apparently have been the postcard he signed) you pull it out of the spread and hand it to him to examine. As he does you ditch the gimmick. Maybe cop it out if it's not too big? I don't know. I mean his attention should be on that signed, altered postcard for at least a few seconds. Then you toss the rest of the cards on the table for him to look through if he wants.
(I like the fact that you draw suspicion to an entire stack of cards. He might imagine a slit in the top card leading to a hollowed out section in the stack with a little reel type thing that pulls the image back or some other complicated situation like that, but at the end you can just spread the entire stack out and it's just cards.)
On the back of his card it says:
Wish you were here.
Since you're not,
I'll come to you.
"What does that mean?" You ask each other.
He gets to leave with his signed, permanently altered postcard.
When he gets home he walks into his bedroom and finds his wife buck naked wearing only one of these.
"Give me your tired, your poor, your hard massive cock, yearning to blow its load," she says.
"God Bless America," your friend replies.
There you go. It's doable as along as you can get your friend's wife to play along. If you can't, then get friends that are more fun in your life.
Also, was there a gas leak at the Cafe? In the thread there on this effect there are people complaining that the Statue of Liberty that's provided for you to produce at the end doesn't look like the one you vanish. Uh... no shit, goofballs. It's supposed to be a joke at the end of the trick. "She vanished... and here she reappeared!" There's some real magician-think going on in that thread. "If the plastic Statue of Liberty doesn't look like the real one, then my audience will never believe I made the picture on a postcard disappear and then reappear but now as a two-inch three-dimensional figurine!" I would contend the last thing you'd want to reproduce is something that sort of looks like the real Statue of Liberty but smaller. Your audience will be like... Uhm, do you want me to believe this is the the statue from the picture or... what are you going for here? I think the goofy statue provided by Masuda is much better. If you can't get your friend's wife, I mean.
