Spreading Negativity
/In March, I suggested the idea of doing a tournament to discover the worst trick of all time and solicited your nominations. After playing things out in my head, I realized a tournament wouldn’t quite work out the way I had intended. And yet here I was with a few dozen nominations for the worst trick of all time. What to do with them?
So I conducted a poll in the last post of April asking if I should post the nominees or not. Does magic have enough negativity, or does it need more?
Well, 89.8% of you thought it could do with just a little more. Okay, you monsters, you asked for this. I’m not going to stand in your way.
I will happily do a rebuttal post to this. If you use or have used one of these tricks and you love it, feel free to write me and I’ll post your input as well. These tricks were nominated as The Worst All Time. But I’m happy to share the opposite opinions. “That TWAT doesn’t stink!”
I got many more nominees than this, but not everyone provided their rationale, so I’m just posting the ones that give some sort of argument.
Here are the TWAT nominees alphabetically, along with the nominator’s rationale, and an occasional note from me in [bold].
It’s a clever method that I’ve only gotten to work on my LEAST INTERESTED spectators. Anyone who is actually interested in what I’m showing them realizes that the words that they are choosing have nothing to do with the wikipedia page they’re on. I can keep them from reading through the page but how am I supposed to get people to ignore that the word they picked on the page for Abraham Lincoln was ‘jujitsu’? Or that “smartphone” appears in the first couple of sentences of the page for the Titanic? These words can’t be ignored because they are the focus of the effect, and the same potential weakness comes up over and over with the trick. When you get lucky and the words aren’t THAT ludicrous it gets a great response. But I haven’t had it work at all on anyone who is paying attention.
[I don’t own this. But I’ve watched two people who raved about the trick fail with it for this exact reason. I like the thinking behind the trick, but I don’t think I could ever perform it because there’s no talking your way out of it if someone notices the words are strange. And anything I ever do with my phone for that person in the future would be totally suspect. Cool idea though.]
I haven't bought the gimmick, but if you listen carefully, you can tell how it works. Actually, you don't even have to listen that carefully. You can clearly hear him click a button, and then the applause sound that plays sounds wildly different from the one that came from their phone. And I'd have to imagine that, when done in person, you could also just tell that the sound is coming from a different place, let alone a different speaker. All of that, plus a deck that cannot be examined, plus (I'm assuming) some basic sleight of hand, all for a worse version of the stop trick.
I’m not sure if the trick is bad or just pointless. Or maybe my opinion of it has been skewed by the trailer, which contains bizarre lines like, ‘Incredibly, the magician finds the fish,’ and, ‘it’s not the only fish in the deck.’
Maybe all omni deck routines suffer from this a bit, but it just seems like such a non-sequitur: “And now the deck is a fish tank!”
Wait. The deck is a what?
[I agree that the omni deck is kind of stupid. The kind of trick that seduces magicians because it can get a strong initial reaction, but also highlights the meaninglessness of most magic. That being said, while I have no dobut the presentation included with Aquarium is terrible, I think it can be used in service of some more surreal premises. See here.]
Check the video, to see how he seems to have totally misunderstood black art. It's as if he is thinking “They can't tell for sure this isn't just a black sheet near the front. To the audience there is a possibility that the black sheet actually is further back.”
Especially notice the part from a real show which seems to be performed in black light.
What is the effect?
Where do you do this, why, for whom?
If you find someone to show this, the ‘method’ should be clear to anyone over 2 years old.
Never liked that trick. Even before I was into magic.
It's obviously a gadget. And the person running the gadget knows the trick. And it's not even that interesting of a trick.
“What? Those tubes have some sort of weird wheels inside. That's magic?”
Boring. Not mysterious. And not even Chinese. Geez.
Dancer’s Dancers Thumbs
The trailer's music rips, but there's no way this is fooling anyone. If someone showed up halfway through, they'd be able to guess the secret. If you described the effect to a blind kid, they'd be able to guess the secret.
[I don’t know if this fools anyone or not. And I wouldn’t do it myself. But I kind of love it.]
A deck with AI-generated portraits of dead celebrities. Way to keep it classy. Especially with recent deaths like Kobe Bryant and Queen Elizabeth. I have nothing against dark humor (I'm pretty morbid myself) but there's no joke here; it's just ghoulish.”
The link is for the Celebrity Deck because I can't find the Dead Famous deck for sale anywhere. Perhaps they realized it's so bad they canceled its release, even though it is still mentioned in the Celebrity Deck advertising.
Magicians love it and there are certainly some clever principles going on, which are utilized well in other tricks. But this, I've only ever seen bomb with real crowds.
[This is a bold choice, given how most magicians feel about this trick. But I like the nominator going out on a limb. And look, if you’re someone who has a trick on this list, you can console yourself by saying, “Dean’s Box is on that list. And that’s a classic. My trick is probably a classic too!”]
The fact that this is available for one cent at Penguin should be a tipoff. I got it as a free bonus in an order, and it's so bad that I'm glad I didn't pay that full cent. While there is a kind of gimmick mechanism involved, it is mostly exactly what it looks like to a spectator: placing an object precariously on the edge of a table and waiting for it to fall on its own.
Why it’s bad…
In addition to being overly procedural (which may be fixed with patter)...
Spectator picks a card. But they never look at the face (so they don't know what card it is).
Place unknown card in between two face up mates. Then cut the three card packet into the middle of deck.
Then magician takes deck under table and spreads through cards and names the chosen card (which the spectator can't confirm since they never looked at the card).
So as proof, magician shows there's no longer a card in-between the two mates.
That's a really convoluted way to show you know what the spectator's card is. Also...
I think it would occur to most people (non-magicians) there may be a way to get to the three card packet since cards are back-to-back/face-to-face. Plus...
Magician keeps cards under the table a loooong time.
[I don’t know if I’d call this the worst trick, but it is a tremendously oblique effect in both method and premise. I can’t imagine choosing to perform this for a layperson with all the more direct card tricks you could show them.]
The only thing that comes to mind here is that trick using receipts that Craig Petty put out. It is so boring. It amazed me that such a boring trick could have created such controversy at the time.
Given the controversy - it is only fair that Craig Petty and Michael Weber share the honour of releasing the worst trick of all time.
The presentation offered with the trick is insane. It also demands the use of an incredibly weird prop, but the prop can't be examined (I assume??). And the routine diverts away from the only interesting thing (the weird prop) at a sharp angle, only to end up in the most boring place possible.
Looks Fake. Abuses a mediocre method.
Hole in the Head was hyped up around when I first got into magic. It's weird because Ben Harris actually has great ideas, i.e. floating match. The trick was that you would make a hole appear in your shadow's head. The audience can't look at you, and you have to be wearing glasses. What layman would see this and not want to look at you? Oh, and also, if you do the convincer taught of waving your hand over the hole, then your fingers move backwards, just in case anyone wasn't clear on the method.
While it may be a recent release it has been such a clusterfuck on multiple levels: the prop itself, presentation, handling, method, and then an addendum that adds problems. Even if you do get through Alexander's handling without anyone pointing out the issues, turning the coin over, dropping, grabbing, etc. It is still pretty lack lustre. I don't think I've had a release where I've felt as entitled to an apology as this one. I came away from this feeling like I needed to offer them a beginner guide to making magic. It is has however made me feel like I could release a best seller as this managed a few super positive reviews, though they haven't outweighed the negative reviews.
This is easy. The worst shit ever is obviously HUG by Nefesch.
Everything about it is so bad it's funny. The method will be obvious even to a blind person. Priced at $45 -- a total robbery. And the quotes. Oh my.
[This one was trashed when it first came out. But I like this Blake Vogt performance of it. At least as a quick, visual moment of weirdness.]
The ad says “classic coin magic with game cartridges.” Matthew Wright’s quote says, “With less and less people carrying coins and cash it’s great to see classic plots and moves given a new lease of life.” As if carrying game cartridges around (with no game system) is somehow more common than coins these days.
More importantly, anyone who is familiar with Nintendo cartridges won’t recognize any of these games as being legitimate, and anyone who isn’t familiar with Nintendo cartridges will be watching a trick with completely unusual, meaningless objects. And while a coin that is a dime on one side and a penny on the other might be hard to conceive of, a piece of plastic that has one sticker on one side and another on the other is a pretty obvious method.
I would like to nominate Light of God (self-lighting bulb). It’s an impressive gimmick, and it works well enough for an initial surprise, especially when you put it in someone else’s hand. But the novelty wears off quickly and I’m sure just about everyone can figure out it’s being activated remotely. Anyway, that’s my pick.
I’m pretty sure a lot of people ended up getting this trick for free during Penguin’s Black Friday sale last year for good reason, they needed to get rid of these stupid things. I would apply the term uncanny valley magic props to this. Had this trick been a Tenyo trick, I probably wouldn’t be so hard on it because Tenyo stuff is so out of left field anyway. But it’s not. Maybe if on the prediction it was a small circular sticker on the chosen seat instead of it being a permanently highlighted seat I’d feel different. That way people think you change which seat it is with each performance. I don’t know. This thing just gave me more questions than answers.
It never fails to bore me to death. On top of that there is seemingly no point in it or at least not one that I would describe as "magical". Plus every time I've seen it performed it's always a grown ass man saying the word "pom-pom" too many times, which seems just kind of weird.
Rainmaker was basically a squirt gun strapped to your back so you could make it rain whenever you wanted. I can't think of anything more obvious or stupid.
A thimble routine, but done with a rubber band wrapped around your finger. Joe says this makes it “relevant” as if thimbles don't belong on fingers and rubber bands do. I suppose for him thimbles are only for Monopoly boards and rubber bands are a natural extension of the body. More likely, though, he turns ideas into rubber bands tricks the same way a lot of magicians look at a new idea and think “yes, but what if I did that with playing cards?”
The reason it’s bad is because of the ridiculous method. To make a freely named card appear in your palm, you have to wear a belt with all 52 cards inside these stupid little metal clips that are stuck by magnets around your waist.
A card is named, then you feel for the correct one of the 13 clips, each of which has 4 folded cards, which you then surreptitiously put into your pocket. THEN you have to pull out the one card of four that corresponds to the chosen card.
The idea that someone is going to walk around in life wearing a fucking belt full of playing cards is what makes this one of the worst trick releases ever. I was lucky to find another sucker to buy it from me.
Like a classic Magician's Coloring Book, this is cut in such a way that you can flip through it and see different sets of pages, but unlike the classic, this one has eight separate sequences, making the gimmick obvious to a spectator and very visible even when not in use. One review notes: “The secret is to perform this bit of magic under dim light and several good feet away from the audience.”