I appreciate the article, Mark, and the documentary does sound interesting (I have been a fan of The Amazing Randi for some time), but I find the inclusion of the last paragraph questionable. Sure, you’ve successfully pressed my squick button, but what relevance do the man’s non-fraud-related criminal activities and/or sexual proclivities (icky as they may be to most of us) have to do with the point of the article? It seems like an unnecessary tangent.
Randi has a damn fine reason to be crabby: as Hydrick and others have repeatedly proved, America is dumb. The world is dumb.
What a demonstration of something else this is – how much more patient viewers were back then. This is such slow TV! But not in a bad way. If this same episode were staged today, it would probably take about a fourth as long, with loud music, tons of audience clapping, booing and so on, and three or four more cameras to switch between every two or three seconds.
It was an unecessasry tangent! Thanks for pointing it out. But it is still interesting to me because the post is also about this fraudster and what kind of person does this kind of stuff. I changed to post to indicate that this was just a side note of interest.
Longtime Randi fan. It’s an interesting doc, but a little unfocused. The final twenty minutes seem very out of context from the first two thirds. It’s an interesting story they’re sharing and I see the interest, but they started somewhere, ended up somewhere else and then didn’t set up any of it in the editing room. Does that make sense?
there’s a great video of Randi dismissing a Scientologist who is pestering him at dinner after one of his lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj-w09kpQcY
I’d agree with that. I found it interesting, but not great.
Might be another unnecessary (and unfair?) tangent, but that guy looks and acts like he’s at least a few bricks short of a load.
I had the honor of having a chat with James Randi at his foundation headquarters in Fort Lauderdale. My brother and I just sauntered in off the street because we were curious about the place. He happened to be around and had an hour chat with us about just everything. He told us some great stories and was just an awesome person to be with.
Looking forward to seeing this movie.
Definitely interesting, but from an entertainment point of view it really doesn’t matter I guess.
This kind of reminded me of something else.
There is a famous magician in japan called Mr Malic who sold himself as a someone with psychic powers. Eventually, of course, everyone realised they weren’t really powers, and he even said so himself on TV.
He went back to just doing magic tricks in bars, and realised that even when telling people it’s just a trick, they still thought it was psychic powers.
So in the end he realised that he didn’t even need to tell people he had powers. His skills in magic tricks got to the point where even when telling people it’s just a trick, they would think it was some kind of psychic power because he was just so good at it.
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