Viewer fascination with TV magic shows surges..
Mike Hughes, For the Lansing State Journal (courtesy photo)
In the high-tech, special-effects world of TV, this is a surprise: Magic is back.
Yes, trickery — a 500-year-old art that needs no camera tricks, a skill often tried by bumbling grade-school kids and tottering old men – is hot again. “We’re just in a new wave now,” Rick Lax said.
Lax, a former Michigan State University student, has a small piece of that (performing Monday on “Penn & Teller: Fool Us”) and had a big piece recently, as a TV creator and producer: “I’ve had a very charmed video life …. My very first idea (’Wizard Wars’) gets on TV and gets great ratings.”
That’s been part of a revival that includes:
•“America’s Got Talent.” Its 10-act finale – 8-10:01 p.m. Tuesday, 8-11 p.m. Wednesday – includes magicians Oz Pearlman, Derek Hughes and Piff the Magic Dragon.
•Last year’s winner of the show, Mat Franco. He has a special from 9-11 p.m. Thursday on NBC.
•“The Carbonaro Effect,” with Michael Carbonaro mixing magic and hidden-camera. New episodes are at 10 p.m. Wednesdays on Tru TV and reruns abound. There are rerun marathons on Wednesdays (7-10 p.m.) and on weekends, including 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 7-10 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 19.
•And the CW summer shows. “Masters of Illusion” is 8 p.m. Fridays; “Penn & Teller: Fool Us” is 8 p.m. Mondays, plus a rerun at 9 p.m. Friday, Sept. 18.
•“Fool Us” is something CW originally bought as low-budget reruns from England, then ordered new episodes for this season and next. “It performed far better than we had ever anticipated,” said Mark Pedowitz, the network programming chief.
Why the surge? Lax gives some credit to two 2006 movies, “The Prestige” and “The Illusionist,” and the 2013 “Now You See Me.” These were no magician-as-nerd cliches; they starred Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Edward Norton and Jesse Eisenberg. A generation already familiar with TV specials by David Copperfield, Criss Angel and David Blaine saw magicians as cool guys.
But there’s another factor in stirring young magicians, he said: “I believe it’s because of the Internet.”
He grants that some magicians dislike the impersonal nature of seeing and buying tricks online. “If you grew up in a town that had a magic shop, you could go there and talk to a real magician.”
That’s what he did, going to a shop in Royal Oak. He’d been hooked on it ever since his parents bought him a magic kit when he was 5. “My grandmother would be baffled and say, ‘How did you do that?!?’ I saw the effect it could have on people.”
Lax became obsessed with performing. At Andover High (near Bloomfield Hills), he was drum major, a playwright and a pianist who performed the first half of “Rhapsody in Blue” by memory.
At MSU, he was in the State Singers, in addition to being vice-chairman of the Freshman Class Council. He says he loved James Madison College and Schuler Books … but grants that he departed after a year, when he finally got accepted at the University of Michigan.
There, Lax majored in political science and prepared to follow his dad’s profession as a lawyer. He did get a law degree (DePaul, in Chicago), was admitted to the bar and interned with the Cook County State’s Attorney office. “I did enjoy it when I got to court (on traffic cases), but that wasn’t often.”
Instead, he moved to Las Vegas and communed with other magicians. “We would sit around and take some objects and try to one-up each other with what we could do with them.”
That led to “Wizard Wars” and a two-season, 12-episode run. Now Lax designs tricks for an Internet company (www.penguinmagic.com) and sent an audition tape to “Fool Us.” Soon, he was trying to fool Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller … the same guys he’d hired as his “Wizard Wars” judges.
This was a new experience, he grants. “I’d never (performed in) a paying show for adults.” Now he was joining the performance part of TV’s magic surge.