wasn't he voted magician of the year somewhat recently? I don't know I just remember hearing something about it. And don't magicians vote on that.

I'm not trying to be sarcastic if it sounds like that (it kind of does to me) but i'm not.

He just brought magic back into the limelight. They were more thanking him for making it easier to get booked as "one of thoes guys that can walk on water like criss angel.

My thoughts.


Juliegel

When he made that whole restaurant of young good looking people go under to hypnosis that is when I wrote him off. A stooge here and there is to be expected for a magician who had a lot of airtime to fill but when he had a WHOLE ROOM full of them, that is beyond being a hack it is pathetic...

That wasn't stooges!






it was sleeping gas

This was one of the demonstrations where you should consider that they probably didn't show everything what happened before to get the people hypnotized. I don't really know, but I guess there's more necessary than music to do a mass hypnosis... There were Mindfreak papers on all of the tables, so everybody knew something would happen, that they would be part of anything. So I guess everybody was very willing to take part in whatever would happen, which is very important for being hypnotized. Maybe he showed them some videos before, also including subliminal messages, and/or other methods to get them into the needed state of mind step by step.
Just my 2 cents as a little food for thought!

so everybody knew something would happen, that they would be part of anything.

That's why the stooges have to sign releases so they don't blab to the general public that they were in on it. I hope i don't offend you but you are sadly naive. Angel is easily the least talented magician to get as famous as he has. As if I need to site more examples of his lack of respect for magic as an art, when he did the nude jail escape and showed exactly how he hid the picks and used them. He should be locked up for real for that one...

I'm not angry when you call me "sadly naive" because you can only judge me by my words and compare them with your own thoughts.
We don't know each other personally. If you knew me, you would know that I could fill books with my thoughts, analysis from different points of views and philosophies...
Maybe I didn't point out clear enough that what I said was only one suggestion while others are as possible as this one. I added it because noone mentioned it before on this thread.
And this is one of the reasons why I like Criss Angel so much: his thought-provoking art and all those discussions pushed me to open my mind to think in other dimensions, and in turn this has impacts on my own art (not only magic), and on my life. He inspired me in the past and to date this didn't change. I don't persuade anybody to agree, but maybe you understand me better when I let you know some of my thoughts and reasons.

Edited: Just a question, if he's not talented as you think, why did he win the Merlin Award so many times? People here always harp on the same tricks that could be explained the way you did, but what about the big things? The Luxor levitation for example... just to name one of the many illusions where it's obvious that he cannot have a whole city on his paycheck.

My dad watches Criss Angel all the time and the hypnosis thing very well COULD have heppened. I not saying it did but you weren't there so can';t say it didn't. My dad's uncle (which would be my great uncle) could hypnotize people. He wasn't a magician or anything he was just very good at hypnosis and went to schools for it and read pretty much evry book on it at that time. My dad told me the story of how he put a video on at a family reunion that he had subliminal messages in and he actually put evryone in the family (including my dad) to sleep. I'm sure it might be extremly easier to use stooges but it still is possible. My dad went through this it wasn't on tv my great uncle wasn't even famous, he was just very good at hypnosis. Criss could be too. So it is VERY possible that Criss could have done this without the aid of stooges.

That sounds cool. Does he still have the video?

I believe my great uncle Buster still has it. He has it up in storage if I'm not mistaken. Along with all his books on hypnosis and stuff. I live in Texas and he lives in Florida but next time I go to visit him I want to see if he'll let me watch the video and read his books and see if he can lecture me on some stuff so maybe I can get started in hypnosis.

sure it is..