Over Promise, Under Deliver

Hoo boy, this takes me back. I recently found on YouTube a little slice of nostalgia. This is the trailer for an old adventure game called Maabus. Way back in the days when DOOM was still flying high as a revolutionary title and freeware games were in vogue, my dad handed my brother and I a Game Empire disc and this trailer was one of the features. We must have watched it into double digits thinking it was the coolest thing ever. As the years went on I lost track of the disc and Maabus floated up into memory every once and again, usually when Google wasn't handy, and I found myself wondering whatever became of it?

Lo and behold, upon finding the trailer I was inspired to do a Google search for Maabus and discovered that the reason I never found it was because it sucked. Visually very impressive for its time and by all accounts an interesting and imaginative story, but it was bogged down by bad gameplay, unresponsive controls, and bugs up the yin-yang. Classic over sell.

This got me to thinking. Those of you who go trolling YouTube for magic videos, a practice about as much fun as looking for winning lottery tickets in a dumpster filled with medical waste, may have run across a young man who describes himself as the official best magician on YouTube. Okay, maybe you've encountered about a dozen of those. But the one I'm thinking of specifically came to my attention not too long ago. He was speaking in support of some talentless twit prostituting himself across magic message boards to edit people's videos. This young spark's videos were a lot of special effects, chromakey, and baffling music choices, but I digress. His supporter showed a video that this tool had made for him, which featured a minute-long disclaimer about how great the show was... from Lance Burton.

I don't know if you knew this, but... Lance Burton generally doesn't concern himself with teenage Criss Angel wannabes. Everyone was rather put off by this, naturally. It didn't help matters that by the time the video actually got around to showing magic it was so heavy on special effects and dramatic music that you started to believe everything this kid did was just trick photography. Didn't help matters that he wasn't a particularly impressive performer.

It's like the trailer for the third Twilight movie. The music is trying so hard, but it can't change the fact that it's a pair of bland teenagers staring at each other while giant CGI Pomeranians duke it out in the background. By all means, you should really sell me on your act/show/product. But there comes a point where you really should shut up and ask yourself how much this one case needs to be sold, if it should even be sold at all.

Readers of TV Tropes might be familiar with, "What do you mean, it's not awesome?" The overwrought, melodramatic cheesiness of videos like the one described above is a common pitfall of the trope and sadly it's a mistake that newbies, amateurs, and greenhorns make all the time. It's very easy to get caught up in the thrill of being epic. Whether it be a live performance or a video that you're dying to show the internet, there's always going to be a small voice in the back of your head insisting that it's not awesome enough.

A less glaring but just as egregious example is one of my favorite punching bags, Liam Walsh. Chances are, if you've had any connection to a large magic community that talks about card magic and flourishing a lot, you've heard of this guy. Or even had the chance to speak with him. If the latter, I'm very sorry. I've never claimed to be a humble man, but Walsh's egotism is so massive and aggressive it threatens to leap out of the screen and try to slash my throat with an ace of spades.

If you've never seen one of his videos of his performances, he's basically a desperately poor man's Dynamo. I have no love for Dynamo either but that's another story. But Walsh takes everything I dislike about Dynamo and his style and then manages to both make it bigger and stupider. Strip away the fancy cuts, and he's doing incredibly pedestrian material and not even presenting it in a very interesting or novel way. His wit is nonexistent, he's a tool to his audience, and he has the myopic arrogance to proclaim that despite his highly derivative and unoriginal style that he is unique and more artistic and magical than David Copperfield. I kid you not, he said that.

Over and over again, I see these guys trying to sell themselves to the public and their skills (such as they are) cannot possibly live up to the hype and all that zazz they preface their acts with. For a generation brought up on reality TV, viral memes, and the rise of the YouTube Cinderella story, it's hardly any surprise that we're seeing more and more young magicians who promise to spin straw into gold and turn out to be just qualified enough to turn beer into urine.

Consider perhaps that boasts are not the best way to draw people's attention.