"Mommmm, the magic reviewers are reviewing each other again."

What a week it’s been for the magic reviewers of the internet. There’s been drama, personal attacks, 51-minute-long magic rants, and heavy accusations. Let’s take a look at The Fall by Noel Qualter and the subsequent fallout amongst the magic reviewers.

This story is about much more than some meaningless magic review bickering. It’s a commentary on the state of magic, why reviews even exist in our industry, and why we all clamour to watch them (spoiler: it’s because we want to know how the tricks are done).

I should start by saying that Noel is a friend, though I maybe speak to him once a year.

Back when I was very young and trying to sell a radio play I’d written, I asked Noel to voice one of the characters. I think I’d met him twice at that point and I was pleasantly surprised when he agreed to help. He did later admit that he thought it was something he could just record on his phone at home and then felt it was too late to back out after I gave him the address of a studio several hours from his home.

Noel showed me ‘The Fall’ several years back, and I also saw it at his Blackpool Magic Convention lecture last year. It’s a card through window effect, performed through a plastic bag that you can carry with you.

Here’s the headline: if you watch the trick and you like it, then the method is worth it. If you’re happy to carry around a piece of acetate or a plastic bag and put in the effort, then it’s a good trick.

It actually reminds me of a stunning coin through glass that I first saw Dynamo performing. The trick itself was a released product but my memory’s lost the name. Now, that coin through glass trick really is difficult to perform but as you can see, it looks beautiful.

Anyway, you can watch some clean shot performances of The Fall performed by Steve Faulkner at the end of his new video, below

Right then, onwards and upwards.

Part 1. (WARNING: WATCH BEFORE BUYING)

If you haven’t watched The Fall’s product trailer, then you should know it really is a fever dream of a trailer. It’s confusing as heck, and perhaps entertaining on the third watch, but I definitely spent the first two watches wondering if this was actually the real trailer, or a parody, or some kind of reaction video.

It’s not a video that accompanies the real trailer — this video is the real trailer, shot by a magician we are presumed to already know, and presented in a sort of meta world in which we see him being asked to shoot and edit the trailer within the trailer itself.

The trick is $40, which is pricey, but Noel self-produced this, so when you presume he’s likely selling these to Murphy’s (the monopoly magic wholesaler) for around $16, the price makes sense — especially when the gimmicks need to be handmade.

Anyway, it wasn’t long before a product review video was posted to YouTube by comedy magician Scott Perry. He titled the video “The Fall by Noel Qualter (WARNING: WATCH BEFORE BUYING)”.

In fact, Perry managed to get his hands on a copy before most who pre-ordered and swiftly uploaded a review that’s pretty dam critical of the product.

When you click on the attention-grabbing title, the review opens with a one minute long TLDR (which is a short recap of his findings):

The video has amassed 3.4k views in just four days as of writing. That’s wild when you consider Scott’s recent videos average around 300 lifetime views. The number of views is even more extraordinary when you remember this video is about a magic product.

His review mostly takes aim at the trailer for, in his view, misrepresenting the product. He wasn’t happy that the trailer referred to the trick as a walk-around version of card through window, informing his viewers that the plastic bag the card penetrates in the trailer is, in fact, not a glass window on the side of a building. Amazingly, the trailer actually includes a line from Matt saying, “it’s not a window.”

In this review and his follow up video (we’ll get to this) he discusses a lot of critiques.

He wasn’t happy that the trailer referred to the gimmicks as being “handmade” because Scott felt this to mean the card gimmicks would be difficult to make himself, and not that he could make them by hand, too.

Scott tells viewers that the trick cannot be performed 360, because If someone is looking up at the trick from below, they’ll see the method.

Scott mentions the clicking noise the method makes, and he also points out that while the product’s ad copy says it’s a five second reset, in the tutorial, Scott says Noel mentions you might need to go to the corner of the room to reset the trick.

Finally, Scott says that the trick requires more pocket space than you might expect, as you’ll need to use a full deck of cards set to perform the trick and not just the individual gimmicked cards supplied.

I’ve watched the trailer an ungodly number of times and reread the ad copy to try to find where it was claimed that the trick could be performed 360 degrees surrounded and can’t actually find any such claim.

Here’s my take: who gives a toss? My thought when this story was submitted to One Ahead and before I watched the video was, “Eh, who cares?” This is a classic case of a magic trailer being made in a style that would appeal to hobbyists, but aimed towards working pros. Pick a lane, lads. Then, Scott Perry had clearly taken what was meant to be a fun trailer far too seriously and made a foolish error in titling his video in all caps, warning people to watch his critical review before buying.

Almost all his critiques were about the marketing campaign and not the trick itself.

Would The Fall have avoided this kind of review if the trailer was just an uncut performance? Yes, probably. Would it have sold more units? It’s hard to know.

I put the submission to one side, thinking that maybe one day I could use it for a story I’ve been working on about why magic reviews even exist in the first place.

It’s fair to say that I didn’t expect so much more to happen in the past three days…

Part 2. The Review Shows Review Each Other

Boom. Out of nowhere, Alakazam (for no obvious reason despite being genuinely upset; they’re not directly affiliated with the product and were sold out at the time) drop a rushed response video on their YouTube channel.

It was at this point, that I took a closer look at the story and witnessed just how riled up everyone was in the comments sections. Big accusations, strong words and a lot of built up anger from all angles. Random magicians cheering and frothing at the mouths about lies, cliques and scams.

I watched the Alakazam video a few times.

Alakazam is one of the longest-running online magic shops and it is terribly successful. It’s run by Peter Nandi and these days it is increasingly fronted by his son, Harry Nardi. Harry’s response video has amassed 1.5k views over the past few days, much less than Perry’s original review video, and brought the critical review to the attention of many who had not seen it.

It’s an odd video.

Harry starts by saying that he’s making the video because a “couple of reviews” had been brought to his attention and uses the term “they” to describe the reviewers for a good few minutes before giving up completely and just using the term “him” to level all of his thoughts at the one reviewer we can presume is Perry.

The video comes across a bit rushed and unprepared. All in all, the response set Perry up pretty well for a follow up video on the trick and Alakazam’s response.

And so, Perry swiftly reappeared on his channel, this time sporting an Ollie Mealing-branded sweater in a 28-minute video that appears to be shot in the dead of the night. He’s not the happiest in this video. If you can look past the anger, he does easily swipe down a lot of Harry’s clumsy comments. Each point is a low hanging fruit for Perry to pick apart.

He’s keen to insist that he never told anyone what to do, despite adamantly recommending not buying the trick in the first thirty seconds of the original review.

There were some funny moments in Perry’s response. At one point, after making a frustrated speech about how loud The Fall’s method is, he demonstrates it openly for us, and we can hear absolutely nothing at all. I’m sure this is in part down to the fact that he’s recording with a clip-on mic, but still — pretty damn funny. I laughed out loud when a minute of “This trick is very loud” built up to a performance of perhaps the quietest trick I’ve ever watched.

The video ends with Perry swearing never to buy anything from Alakazam ever again.

Oh, I forgot to mention that during this time, Craig Petty (another YouTube magic product reviewer) found the time to not only record a 51-minute magic rant at 6AM towards Perry and his review but to also share a post to his Instagram, upset that doing so resulted in attacks against him. Petty writes, “If you don’t like me, my views or my content then what I do is not for you and I invite you not to watch.” Oh, and he’s also just posted a 1 hour and 6 minute follow up video.

Oh, and as I write this, Peter Nardi has just posted a 36-minute interview with Noel about the product.

Part 3. Why It All Matters

It doesn’t. None of it does. Who gives a flying toss if a magnet is a little bit louder than you expected or the wording in a magic trailer isn’t 1000000% accurate?

Well, magicians care. But why?

Magicians are perhaps the worst customers in the world. This sentiment is shared by many of the big magic brands and has driven lots of magic producers out of magic. Of course, I am exaggerating…slightly. It’s not the magician’s fault — it’s magic’s. It’s sort of inherently built on the concept of selling secrets.

I’m friends with one of the biggest magic brands, who have a strong belief that it is almost impossible not to disappoint magic buyers. Whatever you give them, they say, it’ll never be real magic. That’s the problem with selling secrets. They’re right. Almost always, when you buy a trick, there are going to be unexpected downsides because, at the end of the day, it’s not real magic.

I see this anger and frustration built into many of the comments fuelling this fall out.

This is why I’m quite in favour of this shift away from selling secrets. Jeff Prace has the tutorials for all his tricks on public display on his store site. And yet, no one has a bad word to say about his product. People love them.

One of the weird by-products of a secret selling industry is this weird ecosystem of magic reviewers who think people are tuning in to hear whether the trick is worthy of a spot in their close-up case — when in fact, the viewers are mostly just hoping the reviewer will slip up and drop enough clues about how the trick is done that they’ll work out the method (apologises for this long sentence).

In Perry’s follow up, he openly exposes about 80% of the method to his viewers. When called out about it in the comments section he firmly states that he believes he should be able to reveal as much of the method as he likes so long as it’s not the full method and that a viewer cannot recreate the trick based solely on what they’ve seen.

My thought on this is that if you expose 80% of a method it’s going to make it a whole lot easier for viewers to figure out the whole 100%. He seems aware that revealing 100% is bad, so why even go most of the way.

Anyways.

Here are my observations for the magic reviewers to keep in mind.

1. Take it easy.

2. 90% of people buying products have no intention of performing them. They love buying, collecting, learning and playing with magic tricks — and that’s amazing. Half of the remaining ten percent will only perform them for friends and family, and that’s great, too. Magic is a wonderful hobby.

3. 90% of the people who watch your magic reviews are doing so because they want to know how the trick is done and they’re hoping you’ll drop enough clues for them to be able to work it out. Half of the remaining 10% are watching because they’re bored. Nothing wrong with any of this — I commend what you do, but maybe factor it into the process and enjoy it.

4. When a magic trailer contains phrases like “no magnets or threads”, it is not because they think this makes the trick more practical. Most pros will happily perform tricks with magnets and threads. They say this because it makes it harder for you to work out how the trick is done and so you’ll need to buy it to find out.

5. It’s really fucking hard to produce a product. It takes many months and lots of people’s life savings and even then, they’re almost always selling it at 40% of the retail price to Murphy’s.

I sat down to fact check this article at 9pm on Wednesday, the night before this goes out, and literally as I was watching Perry’s videos they both became unlisted. You can now only watch either of them with a direct link. Alakazam’s video response is also no longer online.

Perhaps this is a positive, who knows.

It’s likely Noel sold all his units to Murphy’s long before all of this drama but I bet it’s taken a tole on literally all involved — except me, because this article is behind a paywall and you’re all lovely.

Oh my god, and literally one hour ago as I fact check this Scott was featured in a new 38 minute Q&A video about the fallout. I can’t believe I now have to watch this.

It opens with him saying he has no regrets, before immediately saying he regrets saying things the way he did. I’ll leave you to watch it if you wish. Alex Kirk does a great job as the interviewer.