Magic's Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed (TV Series) Episode #3.3 (2008) User Reviews

Magic's Biggest Douchebag Brought Down

[ttapola · 10/10 · 23 August 2010]

The secrets revealed here have been selected wisely. The decapitation illusion, while startling yet ingeniously simple, is a century old, so it's about time it was retired. Children may not have figured it out, but a thinking adult putting any real effort into it should be able to figure it out. The woman (and flower) appearing & disappearing in a curtained cabinet has also outstayed its welcome and requires no Sherlock Holmes to figure out. Hello! The curtains are pulled to one side! What might be on *that* side inside the cabinet? Houdini's famous milk can escape has been done to death and pretty easy to figure out also. These three treated the audience like simpletons - a great magic trick should be hard for even the professionals to figure out! The other half of the big secrets are a delightfully varied bunch. The Vanishing Dancers trick I was completely unfamiliar with and has to be applauded for its bold sleight-of-hand (or should that be "feet"?) - sadly, it too seems to have been performed for decades and therefore must be done away with. Surviving strangulation from a chain wrapped around a magician's head by making the chain "pass through" the magician's neck so obviously has *only* one possible secret that it should never have been invented at all. And finally, as Mitch Pileggi tells us, "popular extreme magicians have been making themselves float through the air as proof of their unusual freakish powers". For "popular extreme magicians", substitute one Criss Angel, who did this trick in his show's season 2 premiere on May 31, 2006. For someone, who was named Magician of the Year, this cheat, that can *only* be done on TV *and* with false spectators, is really beneath the honor of the award. Well, after the secret is revealed, Criss hits the ground hard, having to start inventing tricks that *aren't* obvious cheats for season 4 of "Mindfreak" that premiered in 2008. But, we will always remain suspicious of him...