"Bubble Gum Magic Volumes 1 and 2" DVDs
by James Coats and Nicholas Byrd
Suggested Retail USD$19.95 each
Available from your favorite dealer
In a Blink: 2 Out of 10

"Bubble Gum Magic", a two-volume set by James Coats and Nicholas Byrd, is a collection material using bubble gum that seems way too familiar and is presented way too badly to be worthwhile.

There are a lot of bad with "Bubble Gum Magic" and little good with it, and that's a shame. It seems to me that doing tricks with sticks and packs and piece of bubble gum would be a neat area to explore. Common objects, very portable objects at that, would seem to be fertile ground for some neat stuff. "Bubble Gum Magic" ain't it.

The material, you see, is about as pedestrian as it gets and, really, to anyone with a bit of experience in magic, the methodology is just not enough to pique interest. An impossible location to a pack of gum? A pack of gum changing at the fingertips from one brand to another? A piece of gum shrinking? All of it seems so old-hat, the methods exactly what you think they are, and just falls flat.

When developing routines for things like this, it's always better to take advantage of the distinct properties of the props you're using. Little of that happens here. When it does happen, as in the case of "Real Sticky Situation", a take on one of my favorite Andy Leviss effect. In that one a chewed piece of gum is taken from the mouth, shakes it, and it restores itself to a new, unwrapped stick, which is shaken again to appear in as a fully wrapped piece of gum. Now that's slick and it plays to the nature of the object.

Putting together a matrix with cards and pieces of gum doesn't.

Okay, so the material, the meat of the discs, is about average. There's some neat thinking there. But then the idea of practicality rears its ugly head and here some of the material really begins to hurt. Some of the set-ups are intimidating acts of craftwork. With some effects you could spend anywhere from fifteen minutes to a half-hour putting together. No problem there if the gimmicked thing is re-usable, but most of the time it's not. That a huge time expenditure for a short piece of magic that doesn't play well to begin with.

And that's another problem: a lot of this material just will not play well at all. Watching the performance segments is sometimes painful just because of the lack of reactions by spectators. Most of the time Byrd and Coates appear to be having more fun than their audiences are, and that's a dreadful thing.

Going beyond the material, the discs run into all sorts of production problems. To be fair to the creators, Coates and Byrd both acknowledge this on the discs. To be fair to the consumer, it should be mentioned in the ads, but it isn't, so allow me. The lighting is way off (if these discs sat in a vat of Clorox for a week they wouldn't be bleached-out more), the sound is terrible in spots, the camera work is so bad that rewinding to catch things is mandatory, and even the navigation needs some serious help. A lot of this could have been fixed post-production or with just a little bit of thought before filming; neither happened. So learning the routines can be a challenge.

Okay, so "Bubble Gum Magic" is a lost cause for most folks. Could I recommend it to anyone? Yes, but it's a select group. If you are looking specifically for magic done with gum and if you are in need of ideas on handlings and gimmicks using gum, then these discs would be worth the comparatively low price. But that's really reaching out to a small group of our already small number and in all honesty I can't see many people really finding these discs that useful.

Overall, Coates and Byrd's "Bubble Gum Magic" started off with a promising theme but just failed to deliver. This is one DVD set that needs a do-over to make it as special as it could have been.

"Bubble Gum Magic Volumes 1 and 2"
by James Coates and Nicholas Byrd
In a Blink: 2 Out of 10

Material: 5
Some of the material is pretty good, some really bad, which is to be expected in a collection like this. The biggest problem is that the material is all weak on new themes and plots that really exploit the props.

Practicality: 3
Oy. While some of this is quite practical, other items require set-ups that are monstrous, usually for a single shot of magic. Twenty minutes to set-up a non-repeatable piece of thirty-second magic? Nope, not practical.

Quality of Production: 1
The production is lousy, as Coats and Byrd admit. The lighting is off, the camera work is slipshod, the sound bad in spots... even the navigation is off on the authoring.

Quality of Instruction: 3
To given them the credit they're due, Coats and Byrd try. Sometime the succeed. Most of the time the explanations are incredibly long over minor details (usually during the set-up). They would have done much better to time-lapse some steps and make things more concise.

Presentation: 2
The presentations are just not there in any sense of the word. Spectator reactions show it.


Shane