You might not know this but when I was a bit healthier, I went on a wild road trip to visit as many of the magic shops in the UK as possible; brick and mortar shops which advertised themselves as selling magic as a main product. I’m explaining that because some of them were kind of 50/50 magic shop and joke shop, magic shop and costume shop, or in one specific case, magic shop and cheap jewellery (you know who you are).
As these visits went on I took more and more footage at each and started making a documentary series about them, until I got utterly fed up of the whole thing and stopped. Still, I made it to about 32 shops, and put out 11 episodes (plus a few minisodes). I still occasionally get people asking if I’m going to put the rest out.
I got backstage access to quite a few places, including the set of the World Magic Shop Wizard Product Review during their live studio audience years.
And recently, while archiving a few Wizard FX DVDs, I put together something that isn’t often talked about.
You know the scene at the end of Iron Man where Nick Fury approaches Tony Stark and asks him to join the Avengers initiative, providing the spark for what would eventually become the Marvel Cinematic Universe¹? As I watched through older DVDs in my collection during the archiving project I was reminded of a time when World Magic Shop, under the Wizard FX label, was putting out DVDs which basically looked like long episodes of the Wizard Product Review.
A perfect example is Ringmaster, by David Jay. The Trailer and the live performance is all filmed out on the streets², but the explanation parts are filmed on the set of the WPR in the warehouse of World Magic Shop, formatted like an interview between David Jay and Craig Petty, where David explains to Craig how the tricks are done. There are a few magic DVDs from this era with a similar aesthetic and it got me thinking. When we did the tour, we interviewed the owners of the shops and the question we always asked if they had their own products was “If someone watching this wants to publish a trick through you, what’s your advice?”
I know, hubris. I honestly thought people would hear about World Magic Shop for the first time in their lives through my shitty travel vlog. What I discovered is that a surprising number of magic shops had a kind of backroom with cameras and lights for filming their own magic products. One place (Saturn Magic) even used their studio to film extra routines and bonus material for third party products, as a selling point for their shop over and above the competition. But this was only really obvious for World Magic Shop because whilst you might only buy one or two magic tricks from a specific creator in a year, there was a Wizard Product Review Every week. That black sofa was burned into people’s minds.
For years, I thought this photo was a World Magic Shop reference.
In fact, this recognition of a studio setup isn’t so different from the Penguin Magic Theatre or the L&L Studio (and its audience, the luckiest assembly of human beings to not realise they were being immortalised) except for that sofa. The Penguin setup mimics a cabaret stage, the L&L setup is similar to the Magic Castle’s Parlour, but the WMS sofa was like no performance location on Earth³.
Add to this the fact that the cast of many of these videos included David Penn and Craig Petty. Sure they released a lot of their own material, but like with the David Jay thing, they often turned up to facilitate other performers explanations, because often these tricks required an extra pair of hands, and it was also far easier for performers used to a closeup interactive performance style to explain the trick TO someone, rather than giving a presentation to the camera. In fact you can see this in some of Craig’s early work, like on the DVD Slim. Filmed in – of all places – a gymnasium, Slim sees Craig Petty performing to Steven Leathwaite, who would later go on to release his own tricks. It got me thinking that if someone had every WMS DVD from back then, you could probably draw a kind of family tree of magicians appearing in each other’s DVDs because they were all friends of the studio.
Of course, after the controversy WMS dropped Craig Petty and since then he has refused to have his fate bound to a single studio, releasing through Alakazam, Penguin, The 1914, and even Prop Dog (the less said about that last one the better).
If you wanted to draw up a cinematic universe now, your best bet would be Alakazam. They have a recognisable studio used for weekly live webcasts, live (recorded) at the table lectures, reviews, and their own product explanations. And Alakazam have been ramping up their product releases lately as well as using the star of Britain’s Got Talent’s 4MG – who happens to be the son of the shop’s owner⁴ – to promote the shop on social media.
Which is why I think, now that we have the work of Kevin Feige to crib from, they’re really missing a trick by not doing part credit scenes on their DVDs and downloads teasing the next big launch. Imagine Peter Nardi as a white Nick Fury, asking Roman Armstrong to join the Amazers Initiative, or having a surprise reveal of Dave Loosely’s return. Not to mention the possibilities of cameos from regulars like Craig Petty or Wayne Goodman.
Then at the end of phase 4 they can do a big 2 part special where they all get together to fight Joshua Jay.
¹ Technically they were probably in post production for Hulk, filming Iron Man 2 and fixing up the script for Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger when Iron Man came out, but if the movie or its reveal had tanked at the box office, you can guarantee the avengers would have gone up in smoke as quick as the Dark Universe, or at least the DC Snyderverse. Yes I am a nerd.
² This was, after all, recorded during the Street Magic renaissance of 2010. It’s hard to impress upon people how fucking batshit this time was, when people thought the way to be a successful magician was to approach total strangers in public, perform fast, hard hitting visual magic at them, and then just become world famous through word of mouth. Insane.
³ Although, having thought about this for a little bit now, there is one performance setting it mimics. The vast majority of the Magic Renaissance of 2010 were teenagers desperate to be like David Blaine or Kriss Angel or Dynamo or Troy (but oddly not like Paul Zenon, the best of the bunch). However, without the backing of a camera crew or the borderline psychopathic courage to approach random strangers on the street, they usually ended up performing in their homes, to their friends, on the sofa.
⁴ Magic is, after all, showbiz. Everyone knows showbiz is stacked to the gills with nepobabies so it only makes sense that there would be a few in magic. From the big names like Daniels and Davenport, through to the smaller connections, like how Issy Simpson is the grand daughter of Russ Stevens, who happens to be the magical advisor for Britain’s Got Talent, deciding who gets to perform what tricks, who will make the live shows, etc.