We're only a few weeks from the 50th anniversary of The Magic Land of Allakazam. One of my favorite TV shows when I was a young'un debuted on CBS on Saturday morning, October 1 of 1960. I may have only tuned in initially because each episode included one cartoon from the Huckleberry Hound show…but I soon became fascinated with what surrounded it; so much so that I wasn't bothered one bit the second season when the cartoons were eliminated. Master magician Mark Wilson would perform amazing feats and — maybe the best part — each week, he'd teach viewers a simple trick that they could do at home. Naturally, I tried every one of them out on my parents and I recall at least a couple times when I managed to actually fool my father. He always acted as if he had no idea how I'd done it but once or twice, it was different. Once or twice, I could tell he actually was baffled. Knowing something your parents don't know is a big deal when you're eight.
At that age, I was already a bit interested in magic, and watching Mark Wilson make things appear and disappear and float fired up that interest. Oddly enough, I was never much into performing in front of people…and when I did, it was for one or two people, never a large group. If I mastered a trick well enough to do it in the mirror, that was enough for me. The few times I assembled a little magic act and did things for a crowd, I didn't particularly enjoy it…but I certainly respected those who did and did it well. I became more of a historian/appreciator of magic than a practitioner and joined the Academy of Magical Arts, aka The Magic Castle. In a piece here some time ago, I wrote the following…
Mark Wilson, by the way, continues to perform magic but is mainly a teacher and consultant. His spouse — "the lovely Nani Darnell," who you'll see in our video clip — handles a lot of his business dealings. Last year, I took a card manipulation class at The Magic Castle. It was not taught by Mr. Wilson but Nani handled the sign-ups and tuition collection and such. Now, you'll have to imagine the following…
We're all in the classroom — guys about my age, all wearing jackets and ties because you have to wear a jacket and tie when you go to the Castle in the evening. Nani comes in and handles the last of the paperwork, then leaves…still looking quite lovely, almost a half-century after the filming of the video below. As soon as she's out of the room, our instructor (a very famous, important magician) admits that he started doing magic decades ago because he had a crush on her and thought that that was the way to get women who looked like that…
…and every guy in the room, myself included, nods in understanding and agreement.
When you hear magicians say that they were inspired by Dai Vernon or Blackstone or even Houdini…well, that may be true in many ways. But I'll bet Nani Darnell caused more young men in the early sixties to become magicians than any of those guys.
The Magic Land of Allakazam was the first regular network series to feature magic tricks. In the video, they say it's been the only one and I sure can't think of another. Don Alan, a fine magician I got to meet and work with before he passed away, had a syndicated show called Magic Ranch for 13 episodes in '61, obviously produced in light of Mark Wilson's success. There have been oodles of magic specials but that's about it for series.
I came to appreciate how difficult that show must have been for Mr. Wilson. Your average experienced magician has a repertoire of maybe an hour's worth of tricks. Some have a lot less. It takes time to develop and learn most of the good magic feats and it costs a lot of money for the hardware to perform the big ones. Mark Wilson had to fill a half-hour every week. That's a helluva lot of magic to conceive, build, rehearse, etc. He also had to work out ways to make the magic credible on a series that was shot on film and obviously edited. The tricks weren't edited but the show itself was and that always reminds you that you're not seeing a live performance.
Thanks to every magic book that I was able to check out from the library, I could figure out how many of Mark Wilson's tricks were done, and that caused my young mind to occasionally wrestle with ethical issues. Wilson would proclaim every week that the magic was done without the aid of any camera tricks — and apart from the opening of the show and some bits in commercials, that seemed to be true. But then in the midst of an illusion, he'd say, "Nani is inside the box," and I knew darn well Nani was no longer in that box. When he said, "I'm putting the three of hearts in my pocket," I knew he actually had it in his other hand. So I'd wonder, at least with regard to the tricks I couldn't figure out: If he'd lie about Nani being in the box and about the three of hearts going into his pocket, is he lying about there being no camera trickery? I'm now sure he wasn't but there is kind of an odd moral standard at work in some magic.
The Magic Land of Allakazam was sponsored by Kellogg's cereal and the show was loaded with Kellogg's promotion. It was on CBS from 1960 to 1962 and then on ABC for a few more years before it disappeared. Wilson sells old episodes on DVD and has a whole website about the show and its history here. He also sells some pretty decent books and videos on how to do magic. Here's a little video that they built out of the show's opening titles. The odd edits whenever Rebo the Clown looks into the Magic Wishing Hat are because they've cut out little clips of Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Mr. Jinks and Pixie and Dixie that used to be in there. I bought some DVDs of the old shows (which alas, lack the Hanna-Barbera elements) and the whole episodes still have that old — the word is unavoidable — magic…