MAGIC TRICKS OR JUST CAMERA TRICKS? …CHRIS ENGEL AND DAVID BLAINE MAY HAVE THE SAME TEACHERS.

By Mansor Puteh

There is an interesting program on television called ‘Magic tricks finally revealed’ that shows how the so-called magic tricks performed by the magicians or illusionists in America, who seem to be delighted to trick anyone with their magic tricks or illusions.

Some of them look impressive and real. The others are too impressive and too real to be true.

The program exposes the tricks or cheating that the telemagicians often do.

First what these telemagicians who like to perform ‘live’ in the streets is that they have setup everything with the persons who they like to say they bump into for the first time, to be nothing more than actors, who were paid to do what they are asked to do.

There are more than one cameras and there is editing.

So how could anyone not be able to perform the tricks?

Chris Engel’s MindFreak looks freaking. Initially one liked to give him the benefit of the doubt.

But later when his tricks were exposed in another program, one begins to ask if he was really a magician or illusionist or telemagician or magic cheat?

I find him to be weird, especially when he would go on to explain how the tricks he does and relish in it by assuming that the viewers of his program on television did not know how they were done.

I watched a program by David Blaine on television recently and was impressed by what he was showing, despite the fact that he did all the tricks in the streets before people who were strangers.

But were they strangers? Or were all of them paid staff or actors?

The telling sign that David is also doing a Chris is when he repeats a trick I had seen earlier in the program that exposes magic cheats.

Chris perform some of the tricks that were done in this program including swallowing a thread and pulling it out from inside the skin of his stomach.

Then David too did the same trick.

Both of them accosted some ‘strangers’ and asked them to watch his trick, and David like Chris also showed their tongue to show that the thread they had swallowed was not in the mouth, that they had swallowed into their stomach.

Then the two of them lifted up their shirt and then pull a thread from inside the skin of their stomach.

The people who were watching them were delighted. They had to be delighted because they were asked to be delighted because they were paid to take part in the act.

So from then on I lost interest and respect for David like I had lost the respect I initially had for Chris.

They are not real magicians or illusionists, but telemagicians who are magic cheats.

So now I suspect the act performed by David when he stood inside a block of ice in Times Square, New York for three days and staying inside a glass box over London for forty-four days to be fake despite it being performed before a live audience.

How could the two of them perform the same acts that had earlier been exposed in another television program?

Did Chris and David go to the same school of magic?

Have they performed before a live audience with no camera tricks? Not that I know of.

Do they dare to do that? I doubt it.

It is not easy for telemagicians to be able to do anything without the help of paid passersby and cameras and editing.

Yes, I am calling them ‘telemagicians’ or ‘magic cheats’, because this is what they are performing acts that many know how to do.  

I pity Chris who was said to have received recognition by being the most impressive magician in America. But what magic tricks had he done which are that impressive?

He once asked a African-American woman to get something in a supermarket, and it is the same thing that he had jotted in a piece of paper that he had given him.

Her friend, who was with her was also equally ecstatic when the note was exposed – like she also knew what was written in it that was the same item that her friend had taken from the shelf. She should not know that, but she did.

She was not instructed not to be excited because she was not supposed to know what was in the note and that it was the same thing that her friend had taken from the shelf.

It is very easy to perform magic cheats on television when there are few cameras and also editing, what more now that they are also performed with body double. 

The only thing I want to see if how Chris Engel’s MindFreak to disappear from Malaysian television and for him to stop pretending to be able to perform all the tricks on television.

I want to challenge him to do them before a live audience.