Module 6- Part 1: Don’t tell Syfy…
Benji
Don’t tell Syfy…
When I was halfway through high school, I got hooked on a Syfy T.V. show called ‘Wizard Wars.’
The idea was a sort of ‘Royal Rumble’ between magicians—two teams were given a selection of random looking props, and tasked with creating a magic act with them.
They were judged on three factors—creativity, showmanship, and deceptiveness.
The team that scored the highest on those three factors would win, and get a chance to battle the ‘in-house’ magicians, aptly named the ‘Wizards.’
If they could beat the Wizards, they’d go home with $10,000 in cash.
I loved that show.
Thing is, I had no way of watching it directly since I wasn’t in the States.
So I remember getting so excited that I found the episodes on YouTube—although they were a little…strange.
The video was a tiny rectangle with a super large blue border, the video kept jumping back and forward to different moments in the show, and everyone’s voices were slightly sped up (and as a result, on the squeaky side.)
But I was hooked.
And as a kid obsessed with magic, it was 12 episodes of pure gold.
(In fact, those very videos are still up, although it took me a little while to realise that they were formatted like that to avoid copyright strikes)
I never understood why ‘Penn and Teller: Fool Us’ was such a smash hit, while this show seemed to ‘slip under the radar’ for everyone.
The judges were iconic, the Wizards were incredible and the contestants were my new heroes…
(Funnily enough, I’ve since written some pretty gnarly promotions for some of those very people. But that’s a story for a different day.)
…but what I loved most about this series was the sheer, unbridled creativity on show.
I’m sure, if I was to rewatch them now, they wouldn’t be quite as perfect as I remember them. Some of the acts were kinda goofy.
But as a kid, what they really did for me, above anything else, was give me a feel for what ‘applied creativity’ looks like.
See, I cared less about seeing who won, and more about seeing what ingenious combinations they would dream up next.
I would never cease to be amazed at what they came up with.
From props that looked completely unrelated—leaf blowers, super soakers, dog food, and so much more—these magicians would be able to create an entire act full of humour, magic and mystery.
It really taught me at a young age that, even if two things don’t seem related, you can nearly ALWAYS create beautiful, creative and deceptive magic out of them.
And although I didn’t know it at the time, that creative process would rear its head again—with the memorized deck.
See, there’s a lot of things I do now that I can likely trace back to my fascination with Wizard Wars.
A lot of ways I’ve found to use the memorized deck at first glance seemed downright weird and totally ‘out of the box’—but have since become some of my favorite creations.
And, even if the end result isn’t anything ground-breaking, the very process of reconciling two seemingly abstract ideas, in itself, reveals a lot about your approach and relationship with magic. It’s often less about the destination, but the journey. Each time, you learn something new about yourself, and magic.
So in this module, we decided to do our own mini ‘Wizard War’ jam session Live on camera. Of course, there were no judges, but the idea was the same—we had some props that seemed totally unrelated to the memorized deck, and we turned them into legitimately powerful effects.
But first, let me tell you about the ‘Ghost Protocol’…