2012-07 Dennis' Deliberations

I think that an academic essay about the popularity of magic would include that observation that magic has ridden on two wild horses:

1) The delivery system

2) Technology

Prior to the 1860s, it was all “Street Magic” or “Court Jester”. The last half of the 19^th century saw the rise of industrial cities and the socialist movements which increased worker’s incomes.  This led to cities and towns packed with people who had a few meager coins and a need for paid entertainment. The music hall in Europe and vaudeville here in America became the “delivery system” for magic. 

The technology for modern magic was machine steel and rubber (used in mechanisms by Robert Houdin and Servais LeRoy) and electric lighting http://www.danalee.ca/ttt/lighting.htm  and the proscenium theater stage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_II,_Duke_of_Saxe-Meiningen . I consider Houdini to be a Doug Henning type of anomaly.  In an age of immigrants in America, he was the little ethnic immigrant who was breaking chains and escaping the poverty of a mundane ordinary life. He was a performance metaphor for triumph over the system.

Sociologists of business look at eras and tell us that business goes in 20 to 30 year cycles with parts of the cycle defined as:  Novelty, Growth, Maturity, Decline, Replacement.    Any technology business is constantly fighting to stay ahead of the technology and how quickly it becomes ubiquitous and washes over them. A business must be able to define what their core product and evolve. i.e.  Buggy Whip manufactures actually being in the “Acceleration and Control” business... Gas Lamp manufacturers being in the “illumination business”...Kodak being in the “Imaging business”...Newspapers being in the “Information” business... Magicians being in the “Entertainment business”...  

As technology changes, if a business is based on strictly operating due to a specific technology and its limited access, they will fail. You can look at the examples above and see how the successful ones transitioned and the ones that failed to change are gone. One shining example of successful evolution is a company I used to work for and have had a long relationship with is , The Harris Corporation. (HRS Stock symbol)    Harris began as a printing press and type-making company!  Understanding that they were in the “Information handling” business they moved into electronic communications hardware.  Just this past month, the radio station I work for bought a new Harris Transmitter. We have other Harris equipment in the station.

Looking at the Magic Arts, you can see some definite trends. The 20-30 year cycle we nostalgically call, “The Second Golden Age of Magic” ran from 1960-2000. the 30 years can be found depending on where you start and end.    Mark Wilson’s TV work along with Paul Osborne’s Theme Park work in the 60s and early 70s put stage magic back in the visibility of the public.  Both freshened up the dated stereotype of the stuffy, bumbling 1920s bumbling magician who most people had never seen but was the typical image in their minds. Actually the few magicians of that era were still doing the routines of the 1920s and the lines! Doug Henning’s image and style was an anomaly which few could or did copy (other than the Gene Anderson Newspaper Tear) but what he did do was prove that a modern audience could enjoy theater magic. He also translated that into his wildly successful blockbuster TV specials which gave Fred Silverman the idea to use David Copperfield on a special to new 1978 ABC Television fall season.

So if we say, “1970 to 2000” we are looking at 30 years and the academic classic business cycle.  If the cycle began technologically as a marriage of magic and TV, then it was brought to a close by new technology of multi-channel cable and satellite TV and the Internet. The major TV Networks had lost so much viewership, with so many channels, that they can not afford the cost or niche nature of magic TV specials.  Mindfreak was designed as a TV series more in the genre of reality TV.   The high point and decline of magic on TV was the Masked Magician series and the Gary Oullett specials.  His “World’s Greatest Magic Specials” were a tossed salad. No one believes that any tossed salad can be defined as “World Greatest”.  They were inconsistent, formulamatic and lacking the strength of personality. It was just a matter of time before people became bored with the magic.

The danger in any blend of magic with technology is that the technology smothers over the entertainment value.  We never want an audience to say, “Its just technology” and today, that is a possibility.  The worst put down by an audience is for them to individually say, “If I had all that technology, I could do that also!”    I am certain that anyone could put together the technology for Carl Ballentine’s Classic Act.  No one else could do it.   We want them to marvel at the magic and not the technology and that is a real challenge today!  I am not sure that the currently hot Marco Tempest can do it.

Looking to be a magic star?  First of all be an incredibly talented, unique personality and then think :Delivery System and Technology.

Dennis Phillips