I meant to comment on her earlier; she is AMAZING.
I can’t count how many times while watching Orphan Black that I totally forgot I was watching one woman playing multiple parts - she’s just that good.
Also I must:
7 Likes
On the show Sliders, the main characters “slid” onto alternate Earths in other dimensions, and sometimes met their own doppelgangers. Whenever Rembrandt Brown (Cleavant Derricks) needed to meet “himself”, they cast his twin brother, Clinton Derricks-Carroll.
9 Likes
Also, Tabitha in “Bewitched”, played by Erin and Diane Murphy. For young kids, remembering lines can be a challenge. Spreading the lines between two twins makes the task easier, and helps comply with laws regulating maximum work hours for young kids.
Of course, since Tabitha was also a witch, there had to be an episode where Tabitha gets lonely and decides to create a twin sister to play with. So the Murphy sisters got to appear together for one episode.
There’s a related concept in stage magic where a usually female magician disappears from a container and reappears in a different container, and there is clearly no way to get from the first container to the second without being seen. Very often this is due to their really being two female magicians and both containers have a hidden compartment large enough to hold one of them. In the trade, the code for this technique is “twins”, though they are seldom related and they don’t even have to look very similar in real life. The women doing this work tend to be fit, flexible and small enough to fit into tight hiding places, meaning they have similar builds. They wear identical costumes and wigs. Their true faces are hidden under identical theatrical makeup. I don’t think it’s a common term, but I’ve heard it called “chorus-line makeup” - designed to hide any individual characteristics and to appear as a generic human female. The whole outfit is designed to make it hard to remember individual features that will help identify the first person when they disappear, beyond broad descriptions like “slim blonde in black tights and shiny leotard”, and the second person clearly meets that description. In most cases, if you saw them both side by side you would immediately spot differences. But since they never appear simultaneously, it’s enough to make the illusion work.
(Often there is also a 3rd performer, usually male, pretending to be the making the illusion happen, but he usually has no real purpose other than to distract from the real magicians, and can be safely ignored.)
7 Likes
4 Likes
I never knew that. So, did Lurch never interact with Thing? (We got the complete series on disc a year ago. I guess I should watch through and look for that.)
2 Likes
In the 1960s television series, Thing—strictly speaking, a disembodied forearm, since it occasionally emerged from its box at near-elbow length—was usually played by Ted Cassidy, who also played the lugubrious butler Lurch. The two characters occasionally appeared in the same scene (in which case Thing would be played by a crew member, notably assistant director Jack Voglin).
2 Likes
Best use I’ve ever heard of for a stage illusion using twins involved Johnny Eck and his fully-limbed brother Robert posing as a volunteer audience member who was sawn in half.
In 1937, Eck and Robert were recruited by the illusionist and hypnotist Rajah Raboid, for his “Miracles of 1937” show.[10] In it they performed a magic feat that amazed audiences. Raboid performed the traditional sawing-a-man-in-half illusion, except with an unexpected twist. At first Robert would pretend to be a member of the audience and heckle the illusionist during his routine, resulting in Robert being called on stage to be sawed in half himself. During the illusion, Robert would then be switched with his twin brother Eck, who played the top half of his body, and a dwarf, who played the bottom half, concealed in specially-built pant legs.[10] After being sawed in half, the legs would suddenly get up and start running away, prompting Eck to jump off the table and start chasing his legs around the stage, screaming, “Come back!” “I want my legs back!”[11]Sometimes he even chased the legs into the audience. The subsequent reaction was amazing – people would scream and sometimes even flee the theater in terror.
4 Likes
There’s a more straightforward reason why this is done- child labor laws. Studios frequently need to shoot for long days because of particular weather conditions, or needing to shoot in specific outdoor lighting conditions for different scenes. Working with child actors then becomes a huge problem. Twins are a workaround for this because no single child has to work longer than the law allows and the crew can shoot for 12-18 hours straight when needed.
6 Likes
True, and rare for all ages.
I’m reminded of that famous psychological experiment, where they’d have someone ask for directions on a college campus, and while getting those directions from the subject of the experiment, they’d be interrupted by some other people carrying a large object, that would separate the questioner and subject, allowing the questioner to be replaced by someone else. As long as questioner/subject were of different “types” (i.e. student vs. teacher age), they could replace the questioner with someone who looked completely different and the subject would rarely notice. The subject would just reduce the person they were interacting with to a type, and only pay attention to that, so as long as that wasn’t disturbed, they were functionally identical.
2 Likes
Rather like this?
I recall something similar for a french candid camera show. They continued swapping people, and it wasnt until they swapped in someone in a Napoleons costume that the mark caught on.
4 Likes
Yeah, his bit is directly based on the experiment, except obviously we’re not seeing all the times it wasn’t successful, which is giving a false impression of a near 100% success rate. And I think in the actual experiments, they asked subjects questions afterwards to see if they had noticed what had happened.
1 Like
Yeah, I was wondering how my times the person thought “Hmmm, I must’ve seen it wrong before”, then merrily continued. Some time in our toddler years we learn about Object Permanence, and how something like this (from the mark’s perspective) can’t happen. I suspect most people notice, and quickly re-write the history; they’d assume they got something wrong before (much more likely than bumping into this kind of setup).
What’s interesting about this (and other) experiments is that they show that people don’t actually look at things/other people, really. They fit them into categories, and the expectation of those categories replace any mental model they had based directly on their senses. So the college campus experiment worked best when the questioner was of a different social group than the subject (either “professor” or “student”) and basically could be pigeonholed and ignored.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
