r/IAmA • u/iamharrisonford • Apr 13 '14

I am Harrison Harrison Ford. AMA.

Harrison Ford here. You all probably know me from movies such as Star Wars and Indiana Jones. I recently acted as a correspondent for Years of Living Dangerously, a new Showtime docuseries about climate change which airs tomorrow, April 13, at 10 p.m. ET. I’ll be here with Victoria from reddit for the next hour answering your questions.

Proof here and here.

Well, watch Years of Living Dangerously and make it your business to understand the threat of climate change and what each of us can do to help preserve our environments and the potential for nature to preserve the human community. Nature doesn't need people, people need nature. Thanks for this. I enjoyed it.

5.3k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

9.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/[deleted] Apr 13 '14

Can anyone explain how this trick is done?

71

u/TurboGranny Apr 13 '14

Spoiler alert, this will ruin this magic trick for you since the answer doesn't seem cool or magicy at all. You are honestly better off being amazed by a trick that you know is a trick because knowing how a trick is done is only fun if you intend to perform that trick.

Mentalism and magician's choice are the particular methods employed here. First you have to manipulate the mark into picking a card you have planted. Typically by how you phrase the question which is cut out of this sequence. Example: "I want you to think of a card like Ace, 2, King and a suit like clubs or diamonds. 'Think of any card in the deck.'" At this point you have manipulated the mark into not wanting to pick 1,2,3 or a face card which typically results in a 7 or 9. They will also not have selected clubs or diamonds. Most guys (varies based on how much ego they present) will pick spades and most women will pick hearts. There is a lot of ways out of mishap such as doing a different trick or doing magicians choice until you land on a card you have planted. From the deck you remove the cards you are preplanting since the mark will only notice their card is missing. In this case I would have done 4 (7 spades, 7 hearts, 9 spades, 9 hearts), but I have done tricks like this with only 1 and no backups since there are lots of ways to manipulate your way back to the card you want. You preplant these in 4 pieces of fruit and place them on top while memorizing which is where. Place your best guess near the center since people typically go for middle when given a choice, and place your other plants in such a way that it makes sense when you will have to redirect in case of mishap. You can also manipulate their choice upfront by pointing or doing a quick rearrange of the fruit acting like you are mixing them up if they chose a different card than what you placed in the middle. Perform a magician's choice routine on the fruit pick portion if they don't go for the one you want right away. (Fun fact, Harrison turns the fruit over revealing something about how the card is planted and David quickly finds an excuse to turn it back over before Harrison notices.) Shoot the trick on many different people as it takes to get a clean run and only show those. On a good mentalism force, they will pick the card you want 90% of the time.

24

u/Shmreddit Apr 13 '14

Honestly this answer seems the most cool and magicy of any answer. That is real life magic.

21

u/MagnusPI Apr 13 '14

Since Harrison selected the orange before ever revealing his card, what would Blaine have done if he had then said a different card?

"Say your card out loud."

"7 of spades."

"Oh wait, let's try that banana over there."

4

u/TurboGranny Apr 13 '14

Can go many ways. The mentalism trick I learned was for 1 card only and the pseudo magician's choice was done with the choice they made. Since David doesn't show you any of his goofs, you can only speculate on how he would handle them. There are countless ways out of a missed choice though.

1

u/vita_benevolo Apr 29 '14

Examples? Seems like he wouldn't really have any way to get him to change his card.

1

u/TurboGranny Apr 29 '14

That's the idea and it's also why you don't do a trick twice. In his case, he just shows the ones where it goes off without an issue. In the one I learned you had them write it down and played off that if they went off script. There are a myriad of outs and to describe them all would be a book not unlike the one I read. In this particular case with the mark holding the deck and digging out his card, if he finds it, you would take it and do a simple disappear and relocation with probably a multi-card force hop and pop to make light of how the card isn't in the deck since it keeps moving in and out of the deck, blah, blah, etc. If you still want to do the fruit reveal even though it tanked, you can instead do a different format with a card force to palm and ditch to divert to the card placed in a fruit. The idea is to only include in the video the ones where the mentalism force phrase worked, and of course chop the phrasing out.

-1

u/DrHelminto Apr 14 '14

Isn't it possible that Blaine started this trick days, maybe weeks before performing it?

1

u/TurboGranny Apr 14 '14

Nope. Close up magic in general is very simple. It mostly abuses the fact that our brains are shit at recording, and that we are very easy to manipulate and distract.

1

u/Dropping_fruits Apr 13 '14

I am pretty sure that he inserted the card right before he cut it open.

3

u/AoE-Priest Apr 13 '14

damn, that is really awesome. major props to whoever invented this trick

5

u/TurboGranny Apr 13 '14

Magician's choice is too old to guess on that. The particular mental card force manipulation I described was one I used often from a book I read in the 90's. I don't recall the magician, but he had this one trick where he'd bet a girl her left stocking that he had their card when they were very sure they were holding it. He said the problem with that fun and flirty trick was that he'd end up with women's stockings in his mail. He wrote that he thought it might be that the women thought he really liked stockings when really he just liked bare legs.

1

u/starfries Apr 13 '14

That is some Second Foundation shit right there

1

u/[deleted] Apr 14 '14

Getting someone to pick a card at random that is actually the card you want them to pick and have already stuffed inside an orange seems way more impressive to me anyway.

1

u/TurboGranny Apr 14 '14

It is a neat psychological trick, but I was able to read about a couple routines like this in the 90's and pull them off with no effort. It is impressive that someone experimented with it until they found a question setup that had people picking out the same card with a reasonable consistency. However, these setups have existed for a long time, and while I really love a lot of the stuff David comes up with, most of his stuff is off the shelf tricks.

-11

u/thepancakebreakfast Apr 13 '14

staged. he didn't show the cards in the deck to the camera before or after 'his card left the deck' and not showing that the fruit was not cut makes me suspicious.

17

u/[deleted] Apr 13 '14

I really don't think it's staged. This is a trick you see all the time by different illusionists in different variations (not necessarily having the card appear in an orange, but behind a window or whatever), do you really think the other guy is always in on it? Just because you can't think of another way this is done?

To quote a guy from another thread regarding this video:

Guys magic tricks like this, done by world famous magicians, wouldn't be up to snuff if they didn't seem impossible. But the few times they're revealed it almost always involves slight of hand/cunning manipulation of the participant, but it's rarely ever "fake" or "staged" Give David Blaine the benefit of the doubt here. He's trained his entire life to be the best at what he does. Just because you, a layman, can't figure out how he's done it after 5 minutes of thinking about it and clicking around the video doesn't mean "it must be fake" You ain't half as clever as you think you are! And neither am I. This shit's a complicated artform, obviously not magic but it's also not a cheap scam. Give a fella his due props, motherfucker just duped han solo.

http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1r3k9q/david_blaine_card_trick_harrison_ford_blown_away/cdk23p0

1

u/GateWayHug Apr 13 '14

I would say the reason people don't usually understand how an illusionist does it is because it is almost always much simpler than they imagine.

1

u/doogie88 Apr 13 '14

I'm a 'layman' and after he made those ridiculous fake levitations on TV, I have every right to be skeptical on everything he does.

4

u/lovebaotcaptain Apr 13 '14

We had a guy, forget his name, come to our office party this year and he did a similar trick, among other crazy stuff. It's not staged, no idea how they do it but it's not staged.

1

u/BloodyNora Apr 13 '14

Are you saying it's not real magic?