David Blaine’s Latest Magic Trick Looks a Lot Like Pixar’s ‘Up’
Most magic tricks have three parts: The pledge, the turn, and the prestige. And then some magic tricks have a fourth part: Copying a famous scene from a Pixar movie.
That is the only conclusion to draw from magician David Blaine’s announcement of his latest stunt, which is called “Ascension” and will air on August 31 on YouTube. The image accompanying the announcement on Twitter shows a man flying among the clouds, dangling from a bunch of multicolored balloons — an idea obviously inspired by the Pixar movie Up, where a depressed widower makes good on a promise to visit a faraway land by flying his entire house off its foundations with the help of hundreds of balloons. (On Twitter, Blaine even noted that the stunt has been “10 years in the making”; Up came out in the summer of 2009.)
Variety claims that Blaine “will attempt to float across the Hudson River, launching with a cluster of balloons from New Jersey across his native New York City skyline.” (Presumably. he will the end the adventure somewhere near Paradise Falls.) Blaine is famous for outlandish stunts like being buried alive or frozen in a block of ice. Perhaps this will be the start of a whole series of Pixar-inspired tricks, like creating a sentient self-driving automobile or teaching a rat to cook five-star cuisine. Just like with this latest stunt, the sky is the limit. David Blaine’s “Ascension” takes place on YouTube on August 31.