"My Ideas" Volumes 1 and 2 DVDs by Fantasio
Suggested Retail USD$15.00 Each
Available from your favorite dealer
In a Blink: 9 Out of 10

"My Ideas", a two-disc series by the legendary Fantasio, is crammed with unusual, offbeat magic that, more than giving you some routines for your act, provides you with a look at the thoughts of a creative genius.

I should tell you I always thought that the word "genius" was coined specifically to describe Fantasio. The man's thinking is just incredible to me, whether it produces his seemingly endless supply of cute gags, his startling stage material, or his twisted close-up stuff. All of it, regardless of its personal value to me as performing material, always made me wonder just what lurks in Fantasio's head.

In the "My Ideas" series, I now know and, brother, it's great stuff.

A bit of a warning before going in: calling this "My Ideas" is what is known as "truth in advertising". Yes, this is material Fantasio has created and performs, but what you get here really amounts to the bare bones of the routines, the central ideas of them, if you will. You'll need to put in the sweat to make these pieces work for you at the levels they can achieve with that work.

You'll also need to spend a lot of quality time with various tools (get your Dremel charged -- Fantasio's love for that tool really shows at times). There is a usually heavy arts and craft component to the material on these discs but that labor is definitely worth it... and this coming from a guy who can't handle a pair of scissors safely without a suit of armor and a doctor on standby.

Okay, so let's get to the material.

Volume One is a collection of Fantasio's ideas on some stage pieces, a couple of card routines, and one "bill-to-impossible location" plot.

"Rider, the Runaway Deck" is exactly as is sounds: a deck put in front of a spectator "runs" across the table, back into your hands. This is a cute piece and, done while seated as Fantasio does it, a silly introductory piece that leaves you in position to begin a card set with no hassles or worries.

"Traveling Image" is just plain weird, with a chosen card left in a wallet, in plain view, suddenly turning blank and the image of it appearing on a silk that was sealed in a pill bottle. It makes use of an ancient gimmick and some slick thinking and was my favorite on this disc.

"Bill to Bic Lighter" is exactly that: a signed bill disappears only to appear inside a Bic lighter... that has to be cut open to retrieve the bill. That's a lot of work during performance but it's a clever idea nonetheless and will likely have you thinking about it and on it for some time.

The three stage pieces here are self-explanatory just from their titles: "Bic Lighter to Card Fan", "Appearing Golf Club", and "Paint Brush to Streamer" are all stage or platform pieces that build on previous Fantasio ideas and marketed items. They are also all extremely clever.

Volume Two had me drooling as soon as I saw where Fantasio was going with it. I'm still drooling over it. "My Magical Medicine Cabinet" is a video of Fantasio's new lecture by the same name and it's incredible stuff. Fantasio went out of his way to make everything appear to be impromptu, pulled from his small, portable "medicine cabinet" and in so doing has opened a world of thinking about such things.

This disc starts with "Band-Aid and Comb", where small Band-Aid bandages, placed on a black comb, jump hither and yon. Yep, it's ye olde paddle routine, but put together literally right in front of the spectator with apparently common items.

After that is one of my personal favorites, "Bayer Jumbo Aspirin". In this one, a plastic travel pack of Bayer aspirin is shown empty, closed, and when opened a jumbo aspirin is shown inside, completely filling the pack. It's removed, the pack opened and closed again, and there's another jumbo aspirin. I loved this one.

Next is "Pill Box", which is partly a magical history lesson as taught by Fantasio. Here, it's a quick tale of how the Okito Coin Box came into being, with a recreation of the original gag that started it all: pill going through the pill box, through your hand, and onto the table. While this is hardly original, it's pleasant to see and watch Fantasio do his thing.

"Vick Sinus Cap" got me... badly. In this one, a bottle of Vick Sinus medicine is shown and the white screw top removed. From there, the top is used in a quick thimble routine, with the top playing the part of the thimble. It vanishes, reappears, moves around... you know the drill. The kicker is the color-change, where the top turns blue, only to disappear from the hands and reappear on back on top of the bottle. This is another of my favorites for obvious reasons: surprise, portability, and plain weirdness.

"Gauze and Tape" is a fascinating idea: substitute a length of gauze from a roll for rope and the outer ring of the roll as the ring for a "ring and rope" routine. That's just a neat idea, period. Equally fascinating was "Dental Floss", a "cut and restored string" routine using, you guess it, dental floss. I loved this one, probably because it's all as self-contained as you could ask for.

"Multiplying Q-Tips" made me slap my head, literally. It's an idea easily worth the cost of the disc: a Q-Tip, pulled from a box, multiplies endlessly, with the produced extra Q-Tips going into the pocket. At one point, those Q-Tips turn into containers of Chapstik... which just keep multiplying as well. Once I saw this one, I also saw the endless possibilities of it and spend the rest of the time watching this disc playing with this idea. It's that good.

"Roll-On" had me giggling; only Fantasio could take the classic "ball and vase" routine and turn it on it's head by using the ball from a roll-on deodorant container and end with the ball vanishing from the hands and re-appearing impossibly back inside the capped container. This was another of my favorites. Continuing with the theme of fighting body odor, next up is "Stick Deodorant", a rising card effect (only Fantasio...). Anyway, a card is chosen from a shuffled deck, returned, and the deck placed inside an empty plastic stick deodorant container. When the little dial is turned on the bottom, a single card begins to rise out of the deck and, of course, it's the chosen card. Yes, it's weird, but it's also got a lot of comedic potential, too, and it does look slick. The final trick on the disc is "Mirror", and utilized the "Flexible Mirror" prop as the door to the "Magical Medicine Cabinet". It's nice way of finishing the performance and the lecture.

Well, if that doesn't give you an idea of the genius that is Fantasio, brilliantly creative and entertainingly twisted, I don't know what will. And if you're not already working through ideas just from reading those descriptions, you need to pass this series by.

Seriously.

You see, as good as the material is, as genuinely clever as the thinking behind them is, Fantasio is sharing ideas here. The real value of this series is in where those ideas take you, if not in methodology (it's awfully hard to improve on a lot of this stuff and downright impossible in most cases) then in presentation. If you're prepared to invest as much energy in that as in the construction of some of these pieces, then you've got a goldmine here and then some.

Fantasio makes the comment that the series is going to continue and it should. This is great stuff and I'm dying to see where Fantasio's thinking goes next.

"My Ideas" Volumes 1 and 2 DVDs by Fantasio
In a Blink: 9 Out of 10

Material: 10
The material is as advertised: it's a collection of Fantasio's ideas. Some are wild, some are insanely clever, some will have you scratching your head. But if you can't get several workable, novel ideas from the foundation Fantasio throws at you, well, you're just not trying.

Practicality: 8
Fantasio's material is hard to gauge here, with the practicality of things running from one extreme to the other. Overall, though, the stuff is fairly practical for the venue it was designed for, whether it's stage, platform, or close-up.

Quality of Production: 7
The production values are good, with very good video and audio; you'll have no difficulty here learning the material.

Quality of Instruction: 10
Fantasio is, simply, excellent. Whether it's teaching some sleights, the use of a gimmick, or the construction of a prop, he's wonderfully clear and thorough.

Presentation: 10
Fantasio's magic has always been visual and unusual. This collection of thinking is certainly no different.


Shane

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