Search - Penn & Teller's Magic and Mystery Tour on DVD

The Best Penn & Teller DVD!

Whitebat | Colorado | 03/30/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The music and animation of the intro are very amusing, a little like Scooby Doo (in a good way).

China

They watched performances by magicians who'd learned from a long line of masters. About the first guy they saw did production of bowls of water (18 in all).

They showed a quick-change artist with masks. This is a Chinese opera thing.

In the teahouse, Penn did some fire eating, but the volunteer he got was slow with the cigarette.

They went to the acrobatics and magic school. They sat in on a magic class (~20-30 students), learning the linking rings with synchronized swimming-like precision. They did the 3 of Clubs force with scleral shells, and none of the students laughed until the teacher did. Penn got to juggle with a gal who juggles knives on horseback. After pair juggling, and pair juggling with flaming clubs/torches, he had to impress her by juggling broken bottles.

They went to a more rural area, where the farmers earn money in the off-season as street performers. They let Teller perform with them the next day. Teller did "Needles" , using an apple from the family's orchard.



Egypt



They were looking for "Galli galli men", traditional street magicians. They showed an Ed Sullivan clip of Luxor Galli Galli, and Egyptian magician who made it big in the U.S. [He had a cups and balls act with live chicks.]

The club they were in had several people doing linking rings. They also met someone doing cups & balls. A waiter was eating glass and a brick.



They visited the cups and balls magician from the club at his apartment. It turns out he's actually a relative of Luxor Galli Galli. He inherited the actual cups and balls.

At their hotel, Teller talked! He told how the cups and balls guy fooled him by faking all the steals, so one ball actually ended up under each cup. The nicest thing anyone could do for him. He also expressed his frustration at trying to communicate a linking rings move to another magician, and not quite succeeding because of the language barrier.



They found a galli galli man who claimed to have invented snake eating, and that no one else could do it. He also showed the first trick he learned, when he was 7 years old, which was a quick series of cigarette productions!

They went to look at a tomb with a mural that might depict cups & balls. They did their cups & balls routine on site, with plastic cups, repeated with clear plastic cups, the whole bit.

The street magic scene in Egypt is mostly nostalgia now.

India



There is a lot of street magic in India; most of the performances they watched had the magician inflicting bodily harm on and then restoring a relative. The first show involved cutting someone's tongue off.



The police broke up the show they were watching. If Penn and Teller had not been filming, the police would also have beaten and robbed the magicians.



They watched another show, which included some geek acts. They two "wild men" at the end, eating live birds. They were actually the magician's brothers-in-law.

They saw a performance of the Indian Rope Trick (rope rises from basket and becomes rigid; boys climbs up; boy climbs down; rope goes limp). They staged the outcome of the rope trick to fool some tourists (mythically, the boy is dismembered at the top and thrown down, then magically restored).



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