JOHN THOMPSON’S ICE CUBE LOAD FOR THE MALINI HAT TRICK
Max Malini
This week’s blog post features one more John Thompson item that we wrote for The Magic of Johnny Thompson but ultimately elected not to include. While it would have benefitted from illustrations, John did review the details of this text and I think careful reading will reveal all that is necessary to understand how to fabricate the special gaff. I’ve always been fond of the plot of the classic hat load trick, and I’ve provided some references that may be helpful to magicians looking to explore this classic further, along with a brief description of my own take on this classic plot.
The Malini hat load trick is a modern classic, described in Modern Magic Manual by Jean Hugard (1939), in Malini and His Magic by Dai Vernon written by Lewis Ganson, and subsequently popularized by many performers, including the British street performer, Percy Press[1] and Paul Gertner’s “Triple Di-lemma”[2] routine with dice. In Malini’s truly legendary version, he would spin a coin several times, cover it with the hat, ask the spectator to guess whether the coin was heads or tails, and then reveal it and comment accordingly. After several repetitions, he would lift the hat, to discover a block of ice! Magicians still speculate on how he managed to maintain the ice prior to the production, and Malini was known to use many a strange object for the foreign load, based on whatever was available at the time. One marvelous anecdote I’ve heard tells of a night that Malini was attending a party at the home of William Larsen, Sr. Several days later the residents noticed an unpleasant smell in the house, but could not find the cause. Eventually, a pork chop was discovered stashed behind a book in the library. Malini had probably stolen it from the freezer and planted it for later access in preparation for its eventual magical appearance – which never came to pass.
Don Alan made the plot famous again with his fez routine, “A Darker Shade of Malini”[3], which he performed on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, among other places. The beauty of using the fez was that not only was it funny, but since men rarely wear hats these days, you can safely introduce this completely contrived and comical item, and its use is in this way more logically justified than merely bringing out an ordinary hat. Alan changed the guessing game into a routine of coin magic (as Gertner would with his dice routine), and end with the production of either a lump of coal, or a large steel tractor nut. Subsequently, John Mendoza—like Alan, a fan of jumbo load routines—described his routine, “The Lump of Coal (TLC)”[4], based on the Alan routine. The magician Howard Flint did a wonderful version of this routine, which climaxed with not one but two giant loads, with a giant steel bolt being produced following the appearance of the steel nut. The genius of this routine was the management that enabled Flint to walk up to the table and sit down in full view of the audience, yet managing to ring the giant loads in without suspicion[5]. (Gertner’s management for this is also extremely clever, since he performs the routine standing!)
THE HAT AND BUNNIES – Jamy Ian Swiss
I have never published my own version, which I performed as a Magic Bartender at the Inn of Magic circa 1985 - 86. The bar is an ideal setting for such a feat because among other things it’s easy to store the big loads conveniently behind the bar! A couple of features of my routine are perhaps worthy of note. I would introduce the routine by proposing to pull a rabbit out of my hat. I would then produce a so-called “flat rabbit,” an ancient comedy prop consisting of a cartoon rabbit drawn onto a piece of white felt. “He packs flat for travel.” (The rabbit, gently rolled up prior to use, was briefly concealed in the inner brim of the hat.) The routine then proceeded with more or less the same sequence as Paul Gertner’s “Die-lemma” routine—the Benson Bowl followed by two-in-the-hand, one-in-the-pocket—except performed with the three-dimensional style of sponge bunnies. In the course of these events, I would do a sequence in the spectator’s hand, loading the baby bunnies, but structuring the misdirection for the load similarly to the way John Thompson’s Benson Bowl routine is described in The Magic of Johnny Thompson (which I had not yet learned from John, but as it turned out our thinking had been parallel). So after a bunny disappears from my hand, I lift the hat as if expecting to find it there. When it’s not there, I pause and have the spectator open her hand, whereupon the babies appear. On that misdirection, I load the final object beneath the hat.
I liked this routine not only because of the natural magic connection between hats and bunnies, but also because of my choice of final load. For this I used a very heavy antique iron, the kind that is simply made of cast iron. This is very useful for purposes of the hat load trick because not only is it heavy and recognizable, and sits flat, but the handle is easily grasped through the hat for the loading process.
After the production of the babies, I would refer back to flat rabbit and offer to explain that while “Eddie” (“Eddie … as in … Eddie … Rabbit … okay, nevermind!” Hey, it was bar magic.) packs flat for travel, it’s really not that convenient, because it’s tough to keep him neat and not wrinkled … at which point I would produce the iron, then pick it up and run it over the felt rabbit, giving me an excuse to drop the heavy iron back onto the surface so everyone would grasp that it was heavy.
One additional detail about my iron is that the handle, rather than being completely connected at two points to the top of the iron, was actually only an “L” and not a complete loop, thus the space was open between the front end of the handle and the iron. On the occasions when I did travel with this routine, I would hook that handle onto my belt in order to position the iron to be produced while I was in a standing position.
ADDENDUM 3.16.21 — HITTING THE BRICKS
While I was writing the description above of my Rabbits-and-Bunnies routine for the Hat Load Trick, I kept thinking about the fact that I distinctly remember having a fake foam brick on hand that I sometimes loaded under the hat. But I couldn’t recall the details when I wrote this up two days ago. However, re-reading this write-up today, the whole brick bit came back to me in a rush, and so I’ll describe it here now.
In the early 1980s I obtained what I think was at the time a new item from Al Goshman, a convincing looking foam rubber brick. (This is apparently still available so here’s a link: https://www.vanishingincmagic.com/stage-and-parlor-magic/foam-brick/) It’s not the kind of brick with the big holes in it, but rather a solid brick, and I went looking and found a similar cement brick that was white, and I painted it in “red brick” color for a perfect match. This is the version of the hat load trick that I did until finding the iron and creating the bunnies routine.
I would begin the routine with the standard Malini coin-spinning guessing game by way of setup. At the appropriate moment, I would load the foam brick. When I revealed the fake brick, I loaded the real brick and set it aside beneath the hat. Now I would do one of two things: Given that it was bar magic, I would often lightly toss the foam brick at the spectator sitting across from me, for the predictably huge reaction and accompanying laughs. However, more often than not I would take the following more subtle approach, which I always used in the case of doing the routine for a woman as the coin guesser. Once the initial reaction died down, I would ask her to pick up the brick. The funny thing is that invariably that spectator’s hands would rise with a little—jump!—when they lifted the foam brick, because they assumed it was much heavier than it actually was. This in turn would generate another laugh. Then I’d sort of bounce it on the bar, or toss it to someone else, and say, “Yeah, it’s fake, it’s foam rubber …. it has to be.” Setting the foam brick aside I’d continue the sentence: “To leave room for this one!” And then I’d produce the genuine brick.
Although more often than not I would then simply lift the real brick and let it drop back onto the bar with a crash, I had another alternative approach here, in which I’d suggest that the bricks were collapsible, and indicate that the spectator should lift the brick. Sometimes they would be unable to on the first attempt, because they were primed for it being light!
While the Goshman brick is a great prop, I’d spent many years thinking of the ideal load for the hat routine, and when I discovered the antique iron, I constructed the bunnies routine around that, a more complex, magical, and entertaining routine.
And so, make what you will of all that, but now, here is John Thompson’s terrific and inexplicable finish for the Malini Hat Trick, that builds on Malini’s ice production but renders it even more impossible.
JOHN THOMPSON’S ICE CUBE LOAD FOR MALINI HAT TRICK
Inspired by Malini’s block of ice, and Don Alan’s fez, John Thompson devised a method for producing a final load of a hatful of loose ice cubes!
This requires a special load chamber that will in turn be secretly loaded into the fez at the appropriate moment. Begin by constructing an insert that perfectly fits the fez; John actually used a child’s metal sand bucket, to which a handle would come attached to two metal tabs that were part of the lip of the bucket. Remove the handle, but leave the tabs intact. The tabs were round but John would cut them square with metal shears. He would then fold these pieces in at a sharp ninety-degree angle. The insert is painted flat black inside and out, and then covered entirely with a layer of black felt, to eliminate noise when the ice is in contact with the bucket.
He would now cut out a circle of metal identical to the size of the open top of the bucket. Two tabs are then cut out of this circle, a fraction larger than the metal bucket tabs, on opposite sides of the lid. Between these two cutouts was one rigid extended tab. One side of the lid would be painted black; the other side would be covered with a piece of dark material matching his close-up pad. He would then glue a row of fake plastic ice cubes atop the perimeter of the feke. (While John developed this in the 1960s, John Mendoza would later describe a similar gimmick, designed to deliver a load of pennies, in his routine, cited above.)
To perform, the bucket is filled with ice cubes, and the lid feke is fixed in position, by aligning the cutouts with the two tabs on the bucket, then rotating the lid only an inch or two until the tabs hold it in place.
The entire load unit begins in the fez, which rests in a close-up case, on the floor to the performer’s side. Reaching into the case to retrieve the loaded hat, the performer carries the entirety upwards toward the table; on the way, the load unit is allowed to drop into the lap, and the performer continues to carry the hat to the table. The load unit remains in the lap for the duration of the routine.
At the appropriate moment, the left hand reaches down toward the seat of your chair, as you apparently scootch your seat in a bit, meanwhile obtaining the load. The right hand lifts the fez to reveal the results of the latest coin spin, and the fez is brought toward the rear of the table and loaded, as you would load a cup for the Cups and Balls, and the right hand replaces the load on the close-up pad, so that the extended tab is at the rear of the fez, closest to the magician.
Both hands extend toward the fez; the left hand comes to rest palm down on the pad, to the immediate left of the fez, and the left thumb presses the extended tab firmly down on the mat, pinning the lid in place. The right hand simultaneously grasps the fez from the right side, and squeezing the gimmick through the fez, turns it and inch until the tabs line up and release; in a continuing action the right hand lifts the hat along with the insert, and the table will be covered with a pile of ice cubes, with the few fake plastic cubes, along with the lid, remaining thoroughly concealed among the pile of genuine cubs. The left hand continues to the inner edge of the table where the insert is lapped, and the hat set aside.
John Thompson was a protégé of Charlie Miller, who in turn learned from no less than Max Malini himself, and probably knew more about Malini’s magic, firsthand, than any other magician, including Dai Vernon. But while John Thompson honored his mentors and invariably gave them great credit, he was not intimidated by them. He was alway willing, indeed committed, to adding his own creativity—processing their great lessons, and never diminishing them, but ultimately making his interpretations of their work his own. I hope you enjoy and appreciate his personal take on Max Malini’s signature routine. John never would have said it was better, but he could confidently call it his own.
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[1] “The Percy Press Glass of Water Production Routine,” by Owen Griffiths, Pabular Vol. 6 No. 12 [December 1980]
[2] Paul Gertner’s Steel and Silver by Richard Kaufman [Kaufman and Greenberg, 1994]
[3] Pretty Sneaky by Don Alan [1956]; also described in In a Class by Himself by Jon Racherbaumer [2000]
[4] The Book of John by John Mendoza [1978]
[5] I have discussed Howard Flint, and describe the details of his management of the final loads, in a lengthy essay that appeared in Antimony [Issue 10 Second Quarter 2007]. His routine was briefly described in his lecture notes, Here’s How [1977].
