Hola! I'm back amigos!
I never search out Criss Angel's Mindfreak, but I'm never disappointed with it when I find it. I think it's the freakish aspects that I like best. For example, he started doing a magic trick in one segment, and a guy walked out of the bathroom and right into the middle of the people who had gathered around to watch. Criss stopped and asked him if he knew what was going on, and gave him some grief for ruining his trick. The guy sort of turned and looked at everyone, and Criss walked behind him, rolled up his sleeve, and rammed his hand through the guy's chest cavity.
Now you could probably see other magicians do it, but they wouldn't be so in-your-face about it. Lance Burton would slowly wiggle his arm in, and David Copperfield probably would have had a female assistant stand there with his arm coming out of her heart, and smile while he played the piano. The hack!
But Criss goes that one extra step that amazes AND sickens you. It's just the sort of guy he is.
I remember one where he went toooooo far. He brought his mother and girlfriend out to see him chained to a conveyor belt, and get dumped into an industrial size woodchipper. EVERYBODY saw him go in. That wasn't the bad part. The bad part is that the machine started spitting out large chunks of meat, leaving it looking like I-75 during deer season. He was fine, of course. You gotta be an especially sick person to bring your mother and girlfriend to that. His mother was crying hysterically, and his girlfriend -- wait a minute. I just realized that she hasn't been in any of the new shows. I wonder if that was her "Screw this" moment.
I'm wondering if he isn't long for this world. In one episode he talked about how Houdini was kind of a scaredy cat, and made sure that every aspect of everything had been planned so perfectly that he couldn't fail. Like that's a bad thing!?
Apparently, Houdini *didn't* plan everything so well, or he might have known that guy was going to punch him in the stomach and kill him.
A rambling melange of pop-culture.
2 comments:
Hahaha! Yeah, Criss Angel is pretty darned good. I saw some outtakes of some of the tricks he performs on one of the specials (season finale or something) a while back. The one that impressed me the most was the trick where he caught the arrow. They had to do like 100+ takes because he kept missing it. Makes you wonder how many times they do that and for how many tricks.
I heard that Houdini was in a bar when that guy punched and killed him? Was it a staged trick?
You are probably right. I think I'm looking at it from a modern view. Criss Angel, David Blaine, and the rest of the young, modern group of magicians are always prepared to do a trick it seems. It's like they are never "off". I think that maybe modern magicians look at stuff like what happened to Houdini and realize that people want them to perform 24/7 on demand. So perhaps it wasn't a fair comparison for me to bring Houdini into it.
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