Ripon Commonwealth Press
Written By: Aaron Becker08.09.2008
Seventeen years ago, Ripon’s local magician AJ Olson vanished a fire truck at the 1991 Riponfest.
Two years later, he returned to Riponfest and escaped from a chained box lifted 80 feet above the ground, suspended by burning ropes.
Those were his teen years.
By his early 20s, Olson had moved to Las Vegas to pursue a career.
”When I moved there, I was going to set the world on fire and be the worlds next David Copperfield,” he said.
Despite his talents, becoming famous wasn’t easy. Although he rubbed shoulders with magicians David Copperfield, Lance Burton, David Blaine, Siegfried and Roy and others, Olson switched gears and began directing and producing and promoting for other magic acts. He tells of a fierce market in Las Vegas performance, and jokes of an old adage: “Of the 400 magicians in Las Vegas, only eight are working. And of those eight, five work at Hollywood Video. Leaving only [the greats] Lance Burton and Penn and Teller,” he said.
Olson, 33, is still in the magic business today just not the same capacity as his spellbinding feats at Riponfest in its heyday. He now teaches tricks, sells magic and provides feedback to new and aspiring magicians at
http://streetofcards.com, an interactive Web site he created.
Magicians can buy new tricks, chat with one another, upload their own videos and more. It launched in September 2007.
Then, this past June, he unveiled SOC-TV, a television channel that offers magic-based programming 24-7 through the Web site. Olson says it’s the first such channel of its kind.
”We have five regular people on staff, and we’re already feeling understaffed,” he said.
With the start of the Web site and, more recently, the TV channel, Olson is making a new career appear, one that was literally 25 years in the making.
Olson has been attending Abbott’s Magic Get-Together in Colon, Mich., every year for the past quarter century.
Colon is called the magic capitol of the world. Once a year, more than 1,000 magicians invade the city, which ordinarily has fewer than 2,000 residents and is surrounded by Amish country. It’s an all-out magical extravaganza. This month marked the 71st annual Magic Get-Together.
Olson describes his annual trip as a “special, unique experience.”
“The history in Colon is just phenomenal,” he said, adding nearly 40 magicians are buried in Colon. “I wanted to share this experience with people.” So over the past few years, he captured 57 hours of video, using skills from his days at Ripon’s Channel 19.
He started editing the footage after the 2007 trip, and now has a 53-minute documentary about the event: “Street of Cards.”
It’s named for the art of “card scaling” , throwing playing cards long distances with accuracy. It’s a common activity at the magic festival, leaving the downtown littered with cards.
”I didn’t want to share a movie with magicians; I wanted to share it with the general public,” he said.
Although the Sundance Film Festival turned it down, Olson wanted to sell it.
He quit his day job this past January and started marketing the documentary over his Web site.
For the first two months, he had no sales. “And I thought I am in trouble. Things are not good,” he said.
The “big change”, as he describes it, came in April, when he attended the National Association of Broadcasters convention. There, Olson learned about Internet Protocol Television, a growing trend in the visual arts.
Weeks later, he unveiled his own magic-based TV channel that broadcasts 24-7 through his Web site.
SOC-TV is a fully functional TV studio, even going live on Wednesday nights from a Las Vegas magic club and every FRI and SAT night from a popular magic night club called the wonderground. These are live broadcasts and open for the general public to enjoy, without exposing the guarded secrets of magic.
It’s available over the Internet now, and also through TVs that have digital converter boxes. The channel will become even more accessible after February 2009, when all broadcast TV goes digital.
It’s already making an impact.
”After SOC-TV launched, then the movies really started selling,” Olson said.
So far, he’s sold DVD’s along with sales of a downloaded version that you can watch online.
The Web site itself, meanwhile, surged from 282 hits in January to more than 7,000 as of August.
That’s enough to amaze even Olson.
”I’ve been watching numbers on Web sites for a long, long time, and I’ve never seen anything grow in popularity this quickly,” he said.
