Dumb Tricks: Two Fish, One Fish

I said in a previous post that the site (as opposed to the newsletters and books) would be a a place for “dumb” tricks. This trick is one of those. I don’t think it’s a bad trick. In fact, if I compared it to a list of “new releases” in magic, I’d probably prefer this trick to at least 50% of those tricks.

I call it a dumb trick because it’s just meaningless impossibility. It’s fun to perform, uses interesting objects, and gets a good reaction, but it doesn’t really fit my style. It will fool people, but because it’s inherently kind of frivolous, it’s not the sort of thing that’s really going to capture their minds long term.

For that reason, I think the best way to perform it is to undersell it.

“Oh, check this out. This is kind of funny….” That sort of attitude.

You need a box of Swedish Fish candy. The ones that are different colors. Not just all red.

You take a fish and bite it in half, leaving just the head or the tail.

You have your friend do the same with a different colored fish. Leaving the opposite of what you left (so if you ate the head and left the tail, they would eat the tail and leave the head). For the purposes of this description, you ate the tail.

So you hold your fish head in one hand and take their tail in the other. You concentrate for a moment and then bring the two pieces together where they form a new whole fish.

Method

Swedish Fish now makes a product called Heads and Tails that has fish with different colored heads and tails. Most normal humans don’t keep up on all the hot Swedish fish news, so most people will be unaware of this. You have one of these fish in your lap. Let’s say it’s a red/yellow one.

You wait for your friend to grab a red or yellow fish from the normal Swedish Fish. You stop them from eating it. “Oh, check this out. This is kind of funny,” you say, or words to that effect.

You grab a red or yellow fish (the opposite of what they have) and bite off and swallow the piece that’s not on the bi-color fish. (For the sake of this explanation, you have the red fish and they have the yellow fish.)

So you have a red head in your hand. You tell your friend to bite off and chew the head of their fish, leaving just the yellow tail.

Lean in a little to monitor their work. “Just nibble off a little more right there,” you say. As the focus is on their yellow fish, your hand with the fish head goes out of view and drops the head in your lap and exchanges it for the bi-color fish which you hold in your left-hand in a way that hides the other color.

You take their tail from them.

What you’re going to do is vanish the tail while revealing the other half of the whole fish in your hand. To make the tail disappear, you’re going to do that old bit where you vanish something stuck to the back of your fingernail (a match, or a piece of paper, or whatever). But here you don’t have to use anything to stick the item to the nail. You just press the freshly bitten area to the back of your thumb as you hold it. It will stick automatically. Then—as I said—you’ll vanish their piece while revealing the whole fish.

You can sort of push the pieces together as in the gif above. Or toss one piece at the other, like this.

As you hand the “restored” fish to them, your dirty hand falls to your lap or your side.

It’s fun. It’s eye candy. (hahahah, oh Andy, you devil.) But it’s not much more than that.

Could it be?

Theoretically, yes. There is a way it could be a life-long memory type of effect. If you could find a real fish that matches the fish you create together and transform the Swedish fish into a real fish at the end, that would be pretty amazing.

The closest thing I’ve found is a bicolor dottyback fish. They seem to be more purplish-pink than red, but it’s pretty close.