America's Got Talent trick - how?

A good rule of thumb for figuring out how a magician does a particular trick - if he or she goes to great lengths to show how a fairly obvious method of accomplishing the trick COULDN’T POSSIBLY be happening here, that’s usually exactly what is happening.

Here’s the trick. Dunno where the girl was.

She was in the base of the wagon. The tallness of the glass case makes the wagon look shorter than it is: it’s large enough to hold Barbie if she lies down on her back, with the hollow wooden box hiding her knees. Note the sequence of events just before she appears:

[ol]
[li]He raises the curtain to hide the lower half of the glass case. At this point Barbie removes her legs from the box and gets herself in a position behind the curtain.
[/li][li]He removes the box on the platform next to the case. He carries it to the side of the case for several seconds, ostensibly so he can stand on it to raise the curtain to the top of the case. Really, it’s to give Barbie enough time to place herself fully behind the case in a standing squat.
[/li][li]He raises the curtain to the top of the glass case. Barbie, hidden by the curtain, stands up at the same time.
[/li][li]He drops the curtain.
[/li][/ol]
I don’t know if that’s exactly how it was done, but it seems doable.

(Edit: Fixed duping error.)

SR - I think you’re right.

Last night they had a different act on - “Quick Change”.

It was a woman with a male assistant (the latter didn’t do much - basically a reversal of the traditional male magician, female assistant). Over the course of the ~two minute act, the woman did a wardrobe change about 6 times, each time progressively faster and with progressively less obscuring her while she did it.

i.e. the first time, she went into a booth and emerged about 3 seconds later in a new outfit. Not all that shocking - a tearaway top outfit or something like that.

But, as I said, the changes got faster and less obscured. On the last one, her male assistant dropped a bag of oversized glitter over her, and in the time it took for the glitter to reach the floor (~1 second), her outfit changed. I watched it frame-by-frame in Tivo and am still not sure how it was done.

Phil, I am pretty sure that act has been on youtube for a while - search for “Quick Change Artist”.

I agree it’s pretty impressive, especially the glitter (really it’s like silver confetti, though the pieces appeared to be more or less poker-chip sized so maybe it’s mutant confetti).

Betty is a powerful wizard!

I just watched it on youtube … pretty neat. It looks like on the glitter change, she’s wearing the same dress and it just changes color. Could she be ripping a very thin red filter off? It’s enticing to think that maybe it’s a liquid crystal dress and she just has to switch it to white, or that the glitter contained nano-lint that sticks instantly to the dress fabric.

Well at the risk of sounding like a wishy washy idiot, I was completely bowled over by Quick Change last night. Honestly I wouldn’t really call it “magic” because there’s no hint of the smugness that I always dislike in the magic I’ve seen. Dunno.

Anyway, loved it loved it loved it.

Yep, looking back at it, he’s 99.99% right. He checks her position before he lifts the box, and you can see the wagon shaking during her reposition. I was thinking trapdoor, but the wagon answer is much easier, and thus much more likely.

H.

After looking at the original trick that inspired the thread I have to say that I’m not particularly angry at that trick either. It’s still not nearly as entertaining as Quick Change though.

I think there is a commercial market for that. If you could create clothing to change styles and looks on the fly like that, I am sure you could make a fortune.

I also thought maybe the key to Quick Change was some sort of transformation in the dress color, rather than a new dress, whether the method was LCD, chemical, or whatever…

But at most (all?) of the dress changes, the dress length and shape changes too, so I doubt that’s it.

I think for the last change (the glitter), she pulls off her top-most dress quickly and drops it behind her. Just before the glitter drop, her hands are both positioned near her neck. When obscured by the glitter, her hands drop to her sides. She could, during that 1-2 seconds, be popping a fastener around her neck and dropping the dress behind her.

Still, even if that’s it, she’s so fast and her timing is so perfect, it’s really an outstanding act. It’s not so much that she changes quickly, but that her methods are flawless and invisible to the audience, and she disposes of the old dress in some obscure way so that you don’t see that either.

Is it just me, or are the judges picking really lame acts. Rappin’ Granny last week was terrible - I thought she was a joke act and I couldn’t believe the judges picked her. This week, the ‘human juggling’ was really lame. Of the ~8 acts, I think the judges picked the worst act last week and the ~5th or so this week.

Also, I’m surprised the producers have the burlesque act on the show. Sort of kills it as ‘family entertainment’. I was planning it again on Tivo tonight on watching it with my 5 and 6 year old, but now I’ll have to closely guard the remote and skip past that part to avoid too many questions from the kiddos…

Yeah…I was actually pretty surprised by that act. I mean, she literally ends up wearing nothing but a feather boa and some bloomers at the end. Brandy seemed to be pretty unhappy about that act too.

Also…that girl’s legs were “problematic.”

Oh, so it was a striptease? When did burlesque come to mean striptease? I thought a burlesque show was a show with lots of parody song & dance numbers. Like what lots of local bar associations put on every year.

I Agree Rappin Granny was horrible. The Juggler guys were much better in the first round, The People juggling was really lame. As for the Burlesque act. I was looking forward to it. I thought it might be an interesting act. As It turned out I was very disapointed. I think last night the contorsionist girl was the best.

Apparently the meaning has changed to imply stripteases in some cases.

The only difference I could tell between the dance this woman did and a modern striptease was that the style of dance was simply more oldfashioned.

By calling it ‘burlesque’, they can put it on TV.

This thread reminded me of a Slate article from a few months back about the couple who does the quick change act. Doesn’t really go into how they do it, but reasonably interesting besides.

This is a minor hijack but is anybody as annoyed as I am with Regis Philbin on this show? I mean, the guy is as subtle as a shark biting off your foot. When he’s about to announce a result he literally screams at the producers things like “Let’s dim the lights! A little tension! A little drama…please!”

It’s as if he’s begging the control room to help him out. I mean, Idol manages to affect all this phony excitement without having to explicitly ask for or describe it.

America’s Got Talent is a neat show but it needs a lot more polish.