Issue 28 - Sept. 09
5 For £5 - Kids
19 page E-Book
Oliver Meech
Available from: www.olivermeech.com
Price: £5.00
This is the second offering from Oliver in his 5 For £5
series of E-Books and contains five effects for performing to children. Once
again, Oliver proves that he is the master of thinking up simple, different
plots. Here are the contents:
1. Fronkey - two piles of picture cards are shown. One pile
has pictures of the top halves of animals, the other the lower halves. A card is
selected from each pile but when put together they turn out to be half of a
monkey and half of a frog - it's a Fronkey (or maybe a Mog?). A box shown at the
start is supposed to contain a soft toy animal to match the selections - and
when removed it is seen to be a monkey with frogs legs!
2. Achoo - a card is chosen. The magician says he has a
cold and sneezes into a handkerchief. On opening the handkerchief up, the snot
has formed itself into the card name.
3. Mmm...Laces - a bitten and then restored strawberry
flavoured lace trick.
4. Well Blow Me (Adapted) - a card is chosen from a pack of
animal cards and the magician tries to guess which one has been chosen. He
fails, but then a drawing of the chosen animal is found to be on a party blower
blown by a helping child.
5. Lego Go Go -
some loose pieces of Lego are dropped into a handkerchief 'bag' and magically
form themselves into a small model.
The good thing about this material is that there isn't a
wooden cut out prop in sight and on no occasion are the children required to
bellow at the performer to 'turn it round'. In other words, this material is for
the most part a long way from traditonal kids' show material. The bad thing is
that the material is a long way from traditonal kids' show material! In other
words, I worry that these ideas will not appeal to a lot of the potential buyers
who are into children's effects because they are so conditoned to performing
standard material. These effects might well appeal to younger performers who are
perhaps less encumbered by traditons, but that may be a very small audience,
which is good for those who DO use this material since not many others will be,
but not so good for Oliver if he wants to sell a goodly number of his E-Book.
To perform these 5 tricks you will need to get together
quite a few bits and pieces, (picture cards, cuddly toys etc), so unlike the
props required for his Coffee E-Book which you can pretty much pick up off your
shelf at home, some effort and time will need to be invested. Although there is
some patter given to accompany the explanations, most of the time these details
are fairly thin on the ground, so you will need to work out how to make these
tricks into fun events for the audience. Experienced entertainers would not find
this a problem, novices might struggle a bit more.
I have always been an exponent of 'pack small, play big'
magic for children, and these effects on the whole fall into that category.
However, I do feel that to make these work in the atmosphere of the average kids
show will need some skill and presentation from the performer, because nice plot
ideas on their own are not normally enough. ML
What's Hot: different plots from the average kids' show
fare
What's Not: needs perhaps a good performer to put the plots across effectively
Star Rating: ***
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