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TechnologyTell Interview: ‘Wizard Wars’ co-creator Rick Lax makes SyFy ratings magic..

TechnologyTell Interview: ‘Wizard Wars’ co-creator Rick Lax makes SyFy ratings magic..

By Brian Allen for Technology Tell

SyFy’s new hit competition Wizard Wars is like Chopped for magicians. Participants are given items to create an illusion with, then have their work judged by a panel including magic icons Penn and Teller.

Like many great ideas, the concept for SyFy competition Wizard Wars had humble beginnings. Vegas-based magician Rick Lax was having some fun with friends at a restaurant.

“After shows, a group of five or six magicians would go get some cheeseburgers and bring an item we wanted to do a trick with,” Lax said. “We’d just pass it around the table. Sometimes a really good trick would come out of it, sometimes we’d get nothing. But it was always really fun to do and really fun to watch.”

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Cheap Trick: Most Magicians Are Lazy Hacks..

Cheap Trick: Most Magicians Are Lazy Hacks..

  By Rick Lax for The Daily Beast..

There’s nothing wrong with recycling the tried-and-testeds of magic. Most magicians do. But it’s time to shock and delight audiences anew.

Ninety percent of magicians perform other magicians’ material. They don’t just take the tricks; they take the whole routines—the lines, the timing, the movement. Sometimes they steal proprietary illusions like Losander’s Floating Table or Piff the Magic Dragon’s Fireball Sneeze (which isn’t OK), but usually they just perform the classics. Classic tricks, classic patter, hack jokes.

That’s not the worst thing in the world. I love cover bands. Hell, I get pissed when cover bands try to slip one of their own songs in the mix. That’s when I use the restroom or grab that second drink. Popular songs are popular for a reason: They’re really good. (Or they’re performed by somebody you want to have sex with.)

Same thing with popular magic tricks. Not the parenthetical—you rarely want to bed the magician performing the trick—but the first part: Popular tricks are performed so often because they’re super-deceptive. That’s why your signed dollar invariably reappears inside a lemon. Why the salt shaker passes through the table. Why the cigarette ashes pass through your hand: They’re great tricks….

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Could ‘Wizard Wars’ aid Vegas?..

Could ‘Wizard Wars’ aid Vegas?..

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By MIKE WEATHERFORD for LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

A couple of things you will see on Syfy’s “Wizard Wars” Tuesday that you don’t see in Las Vegas:

A) New illusions created in a competitive setting, not just the same old stuffing of women into cabinets and stabbing them with swords.

B) The larger illusion that young, attractive people actually sit and watch young, attractive people perform magic in cool nightclubs.

“We did kind of build this ideal magic venue,” Rick Lax says of the latter, created in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner building that’s seen new life for film and TV production.

In Las Vegas, he agrees, “most magic shows are not set up that way. They’re not that intimate and the audience isn’t that attractive and young.”

But maybe A can help make B come true…

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MAGIC MAKES FOR FIERCE COMPETITION ON ‘WIZARD WARS’

MAGIC MAKES FOR FIERCE COMPETITION ON ‘WIZARD WARS’

By Erin Ryan for Las Vegas Weekly

“You’re gonna see a puppy teleport,” Rick Lax says, too calmly. Maybe because he’s also talking about earthworm pickpockets and Spam cooking in someone’s bare hand. That’s a taste of the ferociously inventive magic on Syfy’s new competition show, Wizard Wars, the first of six episodes airing August 19. Similar to the chefs battling on Chopped, challengers on WW are surprised with items like mannequins, pirate costumes and mini-fridges, and they must devise a trick fast and perform it live for a chance to take on the “wizards” and win $10,000.

<em>Wizard Wars</em> creator and former <em>Weekly</em> writer Rick Lax, right, and Justin Flom, one of the show's resident wizards.
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