Showing posts with label magician. Show all posts
Showing posts with label magician. Show all posts

Sunday, August 20, 2023

Advertising magic

Click any image to enlarge

These are posters of old-timey magicians and psychics. Today magicians are understood to be slight-of-hand artists and to use props. They don't, with the exception of spoon bending frauds like Uri Geller, promote themselves to be anything else. However, as can be seen from these promotional posters, back in the day they presented themselves as possessing all manner of ancient Egyptian and Oriental arcane knowledge. I have no idea how seriously people took their claims, but it was common in their marketing. They managed to craft some wonderfully goofy personas in the process.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

A chimpanzee watching a magician



Above is a video from a Japanese TV show of a chimp watching magic tricks. The chimp doesn't dial into all of the tricks, but it has amazing reaction to those tricks that it does understand. I wonder if a dog would fall for the glass full of water trick?