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Controversy sells. I’ve learned about this marketing principle a long time ago.
Yesterday, Lady Gaga validated this principle, when she performed her “Born this Way Ball” world tour in Manila to sellout crowd. (She will reprise her show tonight—again, before an expected large crowd, as fans have snapped up all available tickets.)
Her show came on the heels of controversy. She has been denied a permit to take her concert to the Gelora Bung Karno Stadium in Jakarta on June 3, after hardline religious groups threatened to cause chaos and protests.
The controversy did not take long to spawn Pinoy copycat protesters, who went ballistic over the prospect of her coming to Manila. Their angry faces were plastered on newspapers and flashed on television. They huffed and puffed in front of media, naively piquing the public’s interest in Lady Gaga’s concert.
I’m not sure what these protesters are angry about. To me it seems they hate Lady Gaga for singing irreverent songs, as if irreverence is invented only today.
The indignant posturing before the press did not stop Lady Gaga from coming to Manila. Nor did it stop people from buying tickets and going to her concert in droves. See, controversy sells.
Now I’m mentioning this to you because of Rated K‘s recent episode featuring the Masked Magician revealing the secret of the Change Bag, among other props.
Notice that Rated K, as well as any TV show, features stories on one hand but plays the rating game on the other. The people behind the show knew that revealing magic tricks on TV would get reactions from the magic community. They probably wanted to stir the pot when they came up with the magic revelation concept just to boost their program’s rating.
Sadly, magicians willingly played into the TV people’s hand.
After the Rated K episode aired, magicians thrashed about, jumped up and down, and beat their chests in anger—well, figuratively.
Actually, what they did was went online in droves and wrote indignant posts, which some indignant magicians “Liked” on Facebook, which spread like wildfire online and offline. (There, I just wrote a run-on sentence.)
Someone posted a link on YouTube showing that God-awful episode, and expectedly magicians clicked the link and watched the clip, thus pushing the number of views and making Rated K producers happy.
Controversy sells. Unfortunately, magicians are the ones fanning the controversy. Sigh.
Rated K must be thanking the magic community for helping make the episode the talk of the town—at least in the magician’s side of the town. By spreading the news about the episode on the Net and watching the clip on YouTube, magicians unwittingly stoked the controversy and helped push the program’s rating and viewership.
Expect another revelation episode in the not-so-distant future.
Stay magical,
Leodini
Related articles
- Lady Gaga turns emotional in Manila concert (entertainment.inquirer.net)
Good Day Sir,
At last there is a new entry, been waiting for how many days now to read something useful.. =))
Good thing is I am only watching Music Channels and DVD at home. =) Well, as per controversies it will just fade and be forgotten after-wards.
Remember when people saw the show on TV5 where one great ( im being sarcastic now) magician taught several card tricks in details and everybody was doing it after-wards?
It is true that it will just stir and stir and stir the topic for a few weeks but let us be just positive when it come to these incidents. It will all soon be forgotten. =)
Even when i was just starting in discovering the art of magic, i am always amaze with IT and until now when I see one performing it even I know how it is being done……. I am still amaze… =)
I think that Magic is in the eyes of the beholder. It is how we appreciate the beauty of it even we know that it was already exposed or taught in details.
There are several tricks we perform but also several that are forgotten. Let this be a lesson to us who were gifted with this craft.
” Don’t be bitter just be better”
Regards,
Brycan
Hi Brycan, that’s an excellent way of looking at magic exposures.
Stay magical,
Leodini
Dear Leodini:
i conduct yearly magic workshops for kids here in Bulacan. I teach them how to perform magic tricks and thus a need to reveal the secrets behind the illusion. This
workshop is for a fee and is done in a strictly private and exclusive manner.
Is this tantamount to betrayal of the so-called Magician’s Code?
Hi RJ,
A magic workshop is different from revealing magic tricks on TV, Internet or YouTube for a number of reasons.
Teaching magic to children has definite purposes: to teach them to appreciate the art; to hone their skills in performing; to turn them into artists; and to inculcate in their young mind the sacredness of keeping the methods of magic to themselves.
This is how I learned magic. This is how you and many magicians who love the art learned it. We all learned it from somebody who taught us its secrets. They trained us on the aspects of entertainment. They did not just reveal the secrets of magic. Rather they also imparted to us the love of them. They taught us how perform well and keep the secret methods to ourselves, so we may be able to entertain the lay public.
For this reason, magic workshops pre-qualify the students. The art is taught only to those who, at the minimum, have interest in learning how to perform it. Workshops teach not only tricks but also how to perform magic properly, so the tricks are not accidentally exposed.
TV or YouTube revelations, however, are altogether another matter. Their purpose is not to teach interested students in the art but to merely to satisfy the curious.
Magic exposures don’t pre-qualify their audiences. They air on TV for everybody to see—the curious, the hecklers, the interested and even the not-interested.
Yes, there are people who are not interested in learning the secrets of magic. They want to experience wonder. They derive pleasure in watching amazing phenomena happen live before their eyes. They delight in witnessing occurrences that seemingly defy physics and logic.
But here come the exposures, bursting the illusion that somehow the audience help to create in their mind by suspending their disbelief—and the fun disappears. The wonder is spoiled. The amazement goes away.
Revealing magic tricks is like telling a child there is no Santa Claus. It robs them of magic. It kills the fun. It reminds people how dreary life can be instead of enchanting.
Revealing magic tricks on TV is different from teaching the art to interested students, because revelations reach not only those who are uninterested in the secrets but also—perhaps specially so—the curious and the hecklers.
After discovering the secrets of magic tricks, the curious will have an epiphany. He gets an “Oh, I see” moment. But he has no use of the knowledge he just discovered. He just stores it in his head, waiting to be passed on to other curious seekers of secrets, where he can act like a genius, just because he caught the Masked Magician on TV.
Lastly, magic revelations are not the same as a workshop, because revelations can pass the secrets to antagonistic members of the TV-viewing public, namely, the hecklers.
The hecklers will relish the revelations, because the next time they watch a magic show, they can pleasure in embarrassing the magician. All they need to do is announce for the entire audience to hear the methods the magician uses to perform his tricks—and he will be able to raise a humiliating laughter.
This is a perverted type of entertainment, if you asked me.
Stay magical,
Leodini