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SINGAPORE : It is easy not to take eyelinered, punked-up, blinged-up Criss Angel seriously - even without watching that hilarious Mad TV parody of his TV series. Then again, the guy who came up with the term "mindfreak" - as opposed to "magic trick" might be the only one who takes himself seriously.
As Angel explained over the phone from Las Vegas: "I love the art of magic, but magicians have beaten it down so bad that the name has this hokey connotation to it. You think of a magician and you think of something that's not very provocative; that's not popular culture."
You can be sure that Angel himself is provocative and popular - as he will readily tell you.
"I've just been so fortunate to have connected and to catch the imagination of millions of people all over the world and having a 10-year contract, performing 460 shows a year, being watched on YouTube - like, I think I have the top 20 most-watched entertainment clip in YouTube history, 32 million views of my walking on water. I get fan mail from kids seven or six years old - and from people 82 years old who have seen my live show 25 times. There's a woman who's 76 years old with an entire room with all my stuff in it. It's absolutely amazing!"
What else is amazing is that, in the fifth season of his popular "Criss Angel: Mindfreak TV" series, entitled "The 5 Lives of Criss Angel", the magician will not only do the vanishing-into-thin-air act after driving a motorcycle up the side of a building and levitating 500 people at Times Square - he is even going to levitate viewers at home.
"I will work my connection right through the television monitor and I will create the experience of levitation for people all over the world who watch this programme and they will have the opportunity to write in to me and tell me about their experience," said Angel.
"I'm not saying it will work a hundred per cent, but many viewers will experience levitation or some supernatural event," he added.
Yes, Angel likes the myth of magic, but he pours scorn on the shows that try to "reveal" how magic is done.
"I don't even waste my time with stuff like that. Typically, when people do stuff like that, they're not very intelligent, they're not very creative and they're not very talented and have the charisma of a toenail," he said.
"They don't know real methods of how I actually do something, so they create bogus methods, " he added.
If you really want to know how it is done, Angel, the opportunist will tell you: Get the official Criss Angel magic kit. "It's called Criss Angel Mindfreak: The Ultimate Magic Kit. There's over 500 mindfreaks that you can master, whether you're a beginner, an intermediate or the most advanced mystifier. There are actual mindfreaks that I've performed on television. And this course is US$59 (S$63) on my website. It's over a US$450 value and it is the most amazing magic kit - and I'm not just saying that. I created this magic kit because when I was growing up, I could never find a good magic kit that could really teach me what I wanted to learn - and this magic kit has it all."
Sign us up for two sets then, we're sold. And he didn't even need to hypnotise us or anything.
Catch "The 5 Lives of Criss Angel: Mindfreak" starting February 4 at 11pm on AXN Beyond (StarHub TV Ch 100).TODAY/il
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