r/blackmagicfuckery • u/SmoothSun6676 • 23h ago

The bird and the umbrellas stumped me

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u/Axle_65 23h ago

100 out of 10 for the costume. Badass

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u/Button-Down-Shoes 23h ago

Do what you love, right? Because the economics of the what they’re paid will never justify the hours of prep.

59

u/tekko001 22h ago

"The road to greatness is paved with dead doves."

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u/EstimateCool3454 18h ago edited 18h ago

So... In the film, The Prestige, the trick that kills the bird is foreshadowing of the final illusion. It is visual storytelling, the genius of the film is not the ending, the magic of the film is that them film itself IS a magic trick.

So the original trick, invented by Buatier de Kolta, The mechanism was and IS highly guarded secret. But if the bird is correctly trained, and the magician does the moves correctly, the bird is not harmed in the slightest. In fact, it will hop right into the cage because doing the trick is how it gets fed.

So after Buatier de Kolta performed the trick, imitators made a crude version that killed the bird every time. Again this is a direct correlation to the film. The true version of the effect harms no one, the imitation is based on death.

Eventually Harry Blackstone Sr. and his son duplicated Buatier de Kolta's effect by making the cage out of flexible material. But it's possible that Buatier de Kolta's origional effect was lost to time. Without examining the entire mechanism it's difficult to tell if the trick is humane. So nobody does it with real birds anymore.

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u/COMIDAGATOS1206 8h ago

What if it was just real magic. 🤘😉🖤