Magic Book

It's Mickey's Marvelous Magic Book! This 24-page book features a removable light-up
5-sound magic wand, cups and balls trick, mind reader cube trick, and disappearing Mickey trick. One of the wand's sounds is made by waving the wand in the air. Presto!

I decided early on the the format of this book would include an electronic wand and components for at least three magic tricks that are stored in a vac-form tray to the right of the book. The great challenge of this book was to find tricks that met the following criteria: must be easy for a young child to perform, at least one should be an "iconic" trick that is immediately recognizable, must pass safety testing, must have a depth of less than one inch. The depth limit is to ensure that more than one book can be placed on retail shelving.

Did I mention that cost is also a criteria? Here, the expense of the "sword through the cubes" trick is offset by the less expensive set of 5 playing cards. Note that I am updating the book covers to show a dynamic view of the included tricks.

This version includes some large pieces of plastic--and no electronic wand. I thought it worthwhile to explore this as an option, although we ultimately added it back. Also note that the depth of this version is rather high due to the cups.

This is getting close to the final product. But the cup and ball trick still needed to be smaller in order to reduce the depth. And I found that I was the only person who felt that the wand should have a third color...

Again looking at packaging options, I conceived of a blister pack with a number of additional tricks.

I also explored a boxed set that allowed for a higher cost and increased depth. We did in fact produce a similar boxed set for international markets.

At last we finalize the components, including a black wand and reduced size for the cups and balls trick. At this point, we thought we would need a warning label on the cover, but our safety team determined that we did not need it.

Also during the course of development, I considered the book content. Here is a step-by-step layout of the "Disappearing Mickey" trick. Promise not to tell anyone how this is done!

Here's another how-to (again, you must swear secrecy!). This one includes my sketches of Mickey's hands--some things are more easily drawn than photo-shopped.