REVIEW: French Postcards by Chris Philpott
RATING: 8 out of 10!

FULL REVIEW:

French Postcards takes Paul Curry’s Out Of This World (OOTW) card trick out of the card box and transforms it into a captivating mentalism feat using postcards. This adaptation of the OOTW effect is brilliant and a real winner!

OOTW is renowned to be one of the best if not the best card trick ever created. It has been studied, transformed and reworked for decades. Chris Philpott’s reworking of OOTW resulted in the fantastic French Postcards. Instead of using 52 playing cards, you get 24 postcards; 12 vacation postcards from different locations all over the world and 12 vintage French nude postcards (11 women and 1 man).

The patter explains that an ESP experiment proved that people were able to more accurately predict unseen pictures when they were erotic pictures. You then test the theory using the postcards, after displaying the 12 normal postcards and the 12 erotic postcards. You apparently mix up the cards using a taught shuffle and then have the spectators intuit which post cards are erotic and which are not by dividing them into two piles. In the end, the spectator is able to accurately sort them and they are quite astonished.

With this purchase you get 24 quality postcards with the different pictures. The vacation pictures are heavily dominated with blue sky and blue toned colors. The nude postcards look aged and are all sepia toned with various shades of brown. These colors make it very easy to distinguish the cards not only by content, but by color, which is a very thoughtful touch. The backs of the cards are indistinguishable to any spectator and can be thoroughly examined. Although a spectator cannot tell that there is a way to discern the erotic from the vacation postcards, you will be able to distinguish them very easily with a simple built-in and virtually undetectable system. The card stock is very thick and the cards will last forever if treated with care.

With your purchase you get a small 17 page instructional booklet (3 ½ inches by 5 ½ inches) which is really equivalent to 3 or 4 notebook sized pages of print. I am very familiar with the OOTW effect and have studied and read many different versions over the years. I felt that the instructions were not as clear as they should have been, especially for beginners. Although I don’t think pictures are necessary to teach this effect, there were only two pictures and they were not particularly informative or helpful. You are taught two different handlings; the “traditional” handling and Jon Armstrong’s “Out of this blah, blah, blah.” I use a different handling, not taught, but to each his own. A small point of criticism. The promotional video shows the postcards being riffle shuffled on a table. Nothing is taught using a riffle shuffle and although there are ways you could riffle shuffle the cards (a real shuffle, not a false shuffle) and still proceed with the trick, if you are not familiar with such a method you can’t do it. My problem with the ad copy is that it is critical of the original OOTW effect which says “That’s not magic, it’s filing!” Since OOTW was such a groundbreaking worldwide blockbuster and Philpott uses the premise for his non-playing card version, I thought it was a bit unfair of him to put down a trick that a great majority of magicians will say is one of the greatest and that has floored spectators for as long as we can all remember.

Philpott also will email you a link to videos to teach updates and a comedy routine, if you email him with a certain password. After I sent him the email, it took about a week before the link arrived.

So, it goes without saying that not every audience will be receptive to using ESP to sort “erotic” pictures. Not for kids, churches or conservative folk, so choose your audience wisely. This is also not a great trick for walk-around or a restaurant setting because you need clean table space to lay out the cards. This is however a great trick for causal or parlor settings.

This trick is easy to learn and easy to perform and the reset only takes a fraction of a second after you have performed it. The cards can all be inspected at the end of the trick, but I doubt very much that anyone will want to inspect the card since there is no heat on them.

If you like the sound of this new approach to OOTW, you will love the execution!

French Postcards is available at your favorite Murphy’s Magic retailer!

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