Inspiration for my April Fools animation came from a skit on Joel Hodgson's The TV Wheel. The TV Wheel was a ingenious "experiment" from 1995 that unfortunately never got beyond a pilot. The sketch is "Vick Lawston's Giant Surprise Catalog of Professional Magic." Paul Feig plays Vick Lawston, and Joel is supposedly the voice of Pumpernickel the monkey. Please watch the sketch below starting at 1:32...
Until I wrote this post I had always assumed that Vick Lawston was a fictional character created for the sketch, but to my 'giant surprise' he and the "Giant Surprise Catalog of Professional Magic" are 100% real....
Gee, I feel like I'm the last to know. I sure wish I had a copy of that catalog. The few scans of some of pages I've seen online look priceless. Vick's son Jeff, who's in the reflective tape business, has a small page devoted to his late father right here. It's the most "official" Vick Lawston site you will find on the interweb.
