Magic In An Airport

Lots of you want more creative posts. Here we go, lads. One for the boys. Can I get a whoop whoop? I hope you just whooped. I didn’t. I’m sitting in an airport, and it would be weird to whoop.

When you’re in a writers room or a magic room trying to come up with ideas for a show together, there usually are bins that you dump ideas into. More often than not, producers task you to develop ideas for a celebrity guest or a theme or specific location.

Wouldn’t it be cool if no one ever said wouldn’t it be cool if ever again? The easy thing to do is start every sentence with “wouldn’t it be cool if…” but the truth is that no good ideas start with the words “wouldn’t it be cool if…”

Wouldn’t it be cool if we made one of those airport chairs melt into a puddle on the floor? Ummmm, yeh sure. Is it a good idea? Absolutely not.

The incredible power of wish fulfillment

The easiest shortcut to good ideas is considering what any average person might want to do if they had magical powers. These “wish fulfillment” tricks are almost always good ideas because they have an inherent purpose and are satisfying.

Self-tying shoelaces feel concise, connoting conviction, intention and satisfaction. We see it, and we want it to be true. Everyone has stared down at their untied shoelaces and wished they could tie themselves. It’s relatable. It’s exciting.

Fingering a playing card and then restoring the hole you made does not have the same relatable satisfaction. Sure, it’s a nice toy and fun to buy and play with, but this trick isn’t going to be something you’ll see on the wall in a writers room.

Remember, in the writer’s room you only have ideas on the wall — so they need to be good at their core, without needing to use your imagination to add new methods or never-before-seen visuals. To get to that bit, you’ve got to get the idea approved and to get the idea approved it needs to be inherently good.

Wish fulfilment is almost always inherently good, and they don’t need to be hyper-specific. Levitating and breathing underwater are both wish fulfilments. We all want to do those things if we can.

Wish fulfilment can be intricate. Making cash appear is obviously wish fulfilment, but so is changing mayonnaise to ketchup if the set-up is that you don’t like mayonnaise.

You get the idea.

Magic in an airport

There you go then, that’s the set-up. I’m at the airport, and I’m giving you what you want: a post about creativity. And I’m doing this in a post about giving people what they want as a creativity shortcut to good ideas. This one is for the lads.

Upgrade someone’s ticket

Everyone’s hoping for a free upgrade when they check into their flight. Take someone’s plane ticket, and with a shake, it upgrades magically to first class.

Shrink down a bottle of liquid

Those security checks are put in place to keep us safe, but that doesn’t mean they’re not a tad annoying. Imagine taking a normal-sized bottle of coke and visually shrinking it down to a mini size to get through the checkpoint.

Queue rope through body

Where I’m sat, there’s one of those winding lines of rope/belt that forces you to walk back and forth five or six times instead of walking directly to the gate. We’ve all ducked under one of these. What if we perform rope through the body and pass through the belts magically? I think Troy maybe did this in an early series.

Terminal teleportation

Nothing worse than realising you’re in the wrong terminal right before your flight. It’s nice that from one terminal window, you can usually see another. Imagine vanishing and reappearing across the tarmac and in the correct terminal.

Side note: I just saw a dad sprint the wrong way out of a boarding gate after it had closed. He returned one minute later with his kid’s teddy that they almost left behind, and two flight attendants helped him rush back down to the plane. There’s gotta be a wish fulfillment trick idea in that.

Take off your shoes

Once again, it’s there for our safety but just a tad annoying. Imagine if you took off your jacket, lowered it over your feet and when you lifted it up, your shoes were gone. They magically appear in the bin to go through the x-ray machine.

Baggage appearance (lost luggage)

Losing your luggage or your passport is not ideal. Make that lost luggage reappear magically.

Premium lounge access

Similar vibes to the ticket upgrade. I very much wish I was typing this up at a fancy looking desk in the premium lounge and not on my laptop surrounded by commoners.

Mental baggage scan

We used to fly to visit my Dad abroad every other weekend as kids. My Mom ended up being super relaxed about us packing our bags. We ended up getting stopped for having a toy gun in our bag. Two weeks later, we had handcuffs. Imagine being able to mentally scan someone’s bag to tell them everything they have inside it before they reach security. Similarly, you could scan someone’s body to tell them what’s inside each of their pockets.

Unlock my bag, please.

Forgetting the lock to your luggage is unpleasant. Imagine stopping someone at the airport and getting them to guess the code to your luggage correctly. Perhaps there’s a kicker inside the bag. Maybe it’s a person? We sometimes say I’ll take you in my luggage when someone’s jealous of a trip; perhaps there's a wish fulfilment idea there.

Plug from nowhere

My laptop is about to run out of battery, and I swear I cannot see a single charger nearby. Imagine waving your hand over a section of a table, floor, wall or chair and making a charging plug appear by magic. Equally, imagine stretching out a charging cable to become an impossible length and reach the nearest free charging station.

Wish fulfillment, eh — a shortcut to satisfying magic ideas. You’ll have had your own ideas while reading these. Which shows not only the power of wish fulfillment as a shortcut but also the power of lenses themselves. By looking at creativity through specific lenses, like wish fulfillment, you’re able to increase the speed at which you can generate ideas. We’ll look at more lenses and shortcuts in the coming weeks.

There you go then, one of the lads.