Price$34.95
Media TypeOne-Trick DVD, Utility Props
CategoryClose Up
Date AddedNov 05, 2014
Secret Passage
Sankey, Jay
Sankey Magic
(Based on 2 reviews)
EASY TO DO MAKES FOR AN EYE-POPPING OPENING EFFECT PERFORM JUST BEFORE (OR JUST AFTER) THE SPECTATOR USES THE MARKER *COMES COMPLETE WITH VERY SPECIAL GIMMICK AND FULL-LENGTH DVD
Includes...
BREAKNECK
Visibly CRUSH the marker down to just 2-inches in length! Then immediately restore it to its original length and hand the marker to someone to sign a card. Amazing opening trick. No switch of the marker is required!
INVISIBLY
Cause the cap to 'become invisible.' And then a few moments later, it mysteriously reappears on the marker!
PENETRATING
Impossibly push the marker through the very middle of the cap. You can even 'stop the action' and show the cap stuck on the shaft of the marker! Then after sliding the entire marker through the cap, immediately hand everything out to be examined.
MELTING POINT
Just by rubbing the cap with the tips of your fingers, cause it to 'melt' down the length of the marker, until most of the marker is sealed inside an impossibly long cap!
JAY ON THE FLIPSTICK
Jay has performed Flip's brilliant 'Flipstick' sleight with a marker for decades. Now for the first time ever, Jay shares his original thinking around the 'how, when and why' of this extremely magical technique.
Reviews
(Top ▲)
Overview
When you order Secret Passage by Jay Sankey from your regular magic supplier, your anticipation will build like a kid waiting to open gifts around the holidays. The day comes and the package arrives. You tear open the cellophane wrapper and open the case to look inside. At first you will experience a state of confusion. What is this? There must be some kind of mistake you say to yourself. Then, you will feel anger because you will feel ripped off. When you resign yourself to the fact that you paid a lot of money for a 2¢ gimmick you will probably throw it in the drawer and swear off buying any Sankey stuff again. Maybe one day, possibly out of curiosity or boredom you watch the DVD and it slowly dawns on you what magic is about. It is about the creating of illusion with the simplest means possible. It will also dawn on you on how the masters of illusion see objects and how they can manipulate space and time. Why do I write this? I write this because that is what I experienced with my first visual disappointment with a magic trick and yes it was a Jay Sankey trick. What you get with this and many Sankey releases are not fancy made gimmicks that are so delicate they will break after six uses. What you purchase is an education on how to perceive and perform magic and that is a valuable lesson.Effect
The Sharpie Marker® is one of the most ubiquitous items used in magic. Whether you are a card magician or a mentalist, the Sharpie Marker® is ever present. Why not do more with it that just write? Secret Passage is an interim effect that allows you the ability to slide the cap through the marker and compress and expand the marker at will. As stated, this is an interim effect, it is not the main event. It is the akin to the accent note in music. It goes by in a flash but creates a state of curiosity in the spectator, “did I just see that”?Method
As you may have surmised, the effect it created through the use of a gimmick. When you see the gimmick, you will say to yourself “why didn’t I think of that?” And why didn’t you? Observation and seeing magic in simple objects is the crucible of creation. Learn from this experience.Product Quality
The gimmick is simplistic at best and it resembles a Sharpie® cap at first glance. The DVD is 30 minutes long and has several handlings of the gimmick. The first 15 minutes is spent espousing how much effort Sankey went into developing this amazing routine. The photography seems like it is done in his basement because there is a lot of foot traffic, ambient noise, voices and other distracting sounds throughout the video. It is for the most part a single camera shot done at chest height.Ad Copy Integrity
The ad copy is fairly accurate although there is some artistic license always taken by the creators in describing their products.Final Thoughts
If you are a Sankey fan and already know what you will receive in most of his releases, then you may like this. For the asking price I would consider other choices before plunking down $35 on this one.(Top ▲)
I have to admit, I am a Jay Sankey fan boy. I have been a long time fan and I own a few of his products. Jay is a great magic mind. Secret passage is an interesting idea but I am a little confused concerning the effect. When I first saw it on the market I thought that it was neat that Sankey had come out with a new effect but even after watching the trailer I was confused as to what the effect was. Hopefully this review will help to clear things up for potential buyers.
Basically this is a gimmick that gives the magician the ability to push a marker through its lid, stretch the lid to twice its size, push a marker into its lid, and make a mini marker grow into a full size marker.
The gimmick will come to you a little squished, if you store the gimmick with the marker it should take the right shape after a little bit of time. Also it is some what fragile, it will work for hundreds of performances for sure but you still need to be careful.
Breakneck: A marker shrinks for an instant and expands back out to full size. The performance here is pretty awful, the effect is not clear. He started into the patter, performed the magic and moved right onto the explanation before I realized any magic had happened, even after I had played with the gimmick and watched the trailer it wasn’t clear to me that any magic had happened. I showed the clip blindly to a few other people and they were as lost as I was.
This felt like the kind of performance that my beginning magic students give, without any patter or motivation. It takes away from the trick considerably. I don’t feel like it is a bad effect at all and it is very practical. The way that Sankey presents it is confusing, and confusion is not magic.
Penetrating: With the cap on the back end of the marker the magician is able to push the pen through the marker cap. This is a very cool idea that is super visual and funky. The performance is much better in this demonstration and the handling is just as simple to do as the first.
Melting Point: The cap stretches in this and becomes twice as long. Jay acts like this is obscure to some extent, in my view it is one of the clearest handlings he shares on the DVD and it is just as easy to do as the others.
He tries to explain his thinking behind his lack of patter. All that I can say is that with another trick this thinking may apply but with this particular effect you have to give the audience something or you are bound to confuse rather than amaze. This is not the kind of effect you can do silently.
Invisibly: The marker cap jumps from the magician’s pocket back onto the marker. This is a fun little piece of magic to perform off the cuff during a larger piece of magic. It is not the kind of trick that will stop your show but it is a quick piece of magic that you can easily do with the Secret Passage gimmick.
Flippin Stick: Jay cover’s his ideas on the classic flip stick move. His handling has helped to improve the angles on my current handling. This is a great move and can really stun people. It’s not original to Jay but there are no crediting problems.
Full Grown: Jay presents this almost as a throwaway idea. It goes very quick, I was really intrigued by this and thought that it would have been nice to have a more developed handling of the trick.
Jay’s a pro and a legend in his own right. This is a cool gimmick and you can pull off some neat effects with it. There is some problematic magic theory taught here which will hurt the magicians trying to use this but if you want to achieve any of the effects taught then this is a viable resource.
Basically this is a gimmick that gives the magician the ability to push a marker through its lid, stretch the lid to twice its size, push a marker into its lid, and make a mini marker grow into a full size marker.
The gimmick will come to you a little squished, if you store the gimmick with the marker it should take the right shape after a little bit of time. Also it is some what fragile, it will work for hundreds of performances for sure but you still need to be careful.
Breakneck: A marker shrinks for an instant and expands back out to full size. The performance here is pretty awful, the effect is not clear. He started into the patter, performed the magic and moved right onto the explanation before I realized any magic had happened, even after I had played with the gimmick and watched the trailer it wasn’t clear to me that any magic had happened. I showed the clip blindly to a few other people and they were as lost as I was.
This felt like the kind of performance that my beginning magic students give, without any patter or motivation. It takes away from the trick considerably. I don’t feel like it is a bad effect at all and it is very practical. The way that Sankey presents it is confusing, and confusion is not magic.
Penetrating: With the cap on the back end of the marker the magician is able to push the pen through the marker cap. This is a very cool idea that is super visual and funky. The performance is much better in this demonstration and the handling is just as simple to do as the first.
Melting Point: The cap stretches in this and becomes twice as long. Jay acts like this is obscure to some extent, in my view it is one of the clearest handlings he shares on the DVD and it is just as easy to do as the others.
He tries to explain his thinking behind his lack of patter. All that I can say is that with another trick this thinking may apply but with this particular effect you have to give the audience something or you are bound to confuse rather than amaze. This is not the kind of effect you can do silently.
Invisibly: The marker cap jumps from the magician’s pocket back onto the marker. This is a fun little piece of magic to perform off the cuff during a larger piece of magic. It is not the kind of trick that will stop your show but it is a quick piece of magic that you can easily do with the Secret Passage gimmick.
Flippin Stick: Jay cover’s his ideas on the classic flip stick move. His handling has helped to improve the angles on my current handling. This is a great move and can really stun people. It’s not original to Jay but there are no crediting problems.
Full Grown: Jay presents this almost as a throwaway idea. It goes very quick, I was really intrigued by this and thought that it would have been nice to have a more developed handling of the trick.
Jay’s a pro and a legend in his own right. This is a cool gimmick and you can pull off some neat effects with it. There is some problematic magic theory taught here which will hurt the magicians trying to use this but if you want to achieve any of the effects taught then this is a viable resource.