Riding off into the weekend: Copperfield's

Once upon a time, magic was big. Around the same time that half the kids in the country wanted to grow up to be standup comics, the other half wanted to grow up to be magicians. TV was filled with specials, and many performers reached superstar status, most especially David Copperfield. (Nice name. He changed it from his real name, Uriah Heep.)

Meanwhile, the Disney parks had been into magic since forever. There was a magic shop near the end of Main Street (in both WDW's MK and in California's DL if I'm not mistaken), where kids could ogle tricks they could purchase, and the staff performed/demonstrated their wares. This particular shop going extinct is one of the great losses of the parks.

Anyhow, put Disney and magical superstardom together, and what do you get? The World That Never Was: Copperfield’s Magic Underground.

The author of the article wonders if it would have worked. Maybe, but not unless there was a heavy dose of live performance. For a while Caesar's in Vegas had a setup where you had an evening of magic broken down into three parts: dinner with magic (hard to explain, but trust me, it was magical), close-up magic in a small venue, and major illusions on a big stage. You went from one to the other over the course of the evening. This was back when Vegas was in its family-friendly stage, and we loved it, but it has been replaced, like so many things, by Celine Dion. Magic, as it turns out, isn't what it used to be. Nowadays half the kids in the country want to grow up to be Steve Jobs, and the other half want to grow up to have any job, period. Times have changed.

Oh, well. Have a good long end-of-summer weekend!