The last few years have seen a strange trend I am not sure I like. It's the selling of of an "award winning" act on DVD well before that performer has gotten too old to do it.
Some say it's to show their techniques to put a time stamp on it but they do not "encourage" you to perform their act verbatim. I understand letting it all go after a lifetime of creation and magic. However I think the selling of a magic competition act after only a few years is for one sole purpose... profit.
I guess when there is a buck to be made, there is no point in keeping secrets.
I recently bought one such DVD (2DVD set in fact) from Suzanne. Interestingly the DVD pair is entirely about a 4 effect set that Suzanne does at the Magic Castle, and only the opening two card effects are explained. The rest is correctly credited and discussed briefly and that's pretty much it.Ironically I picked it up in order to learn one of the tricks which wasn't even explained (although, it did give enough info to track down the original place it's published) but it got me thinking about this exact same thing.
ReplyDeleteCompetition acts... well they can only win the competition once, so that's understandable, but this is Suzanne's working repertoire. She clearly didn't want to make it too easy to replicate because she didn't want to explain the whole thing, so the question is why release it at all?
I doubt she needs the money. I'm as baffled as you.