The Amazing Kreskin

George Joseph Kresge, Jr. (born January 12, 1935), better known as The Amazing Kreskin, is a mentalist who became popular on North American television in the 1970s. He was inspired to become a mentalist by Lee Falk's famous comic strip Mandrake the Magician, which features a crime-fighting stage magician.

Kresge was born in Montclair, New Jersey. From 1971 to 1975, his television series The Amazing World of Kreskin was broadcast throughout Canada on CTV Television Network and distributed in the United States. The series was produced in Ottawa, Ontario. An additional set of episodes was produced in 1975, billed as The New Kreskin Show. Then in the 1980s and 1990s, he came to prominence again through several appearances on Late Night with David Letterman.

He is still active as a live performer, appears regularly on WPIX in New York City, and appears annually on CNN to give his New Year's Day predictions for the coming year.One of his best known tricks is finding his check for a performance, which he instructs the audience to hide his check while he is escorted off stage and into seclusion by other members of the audience. While finding the check on most occasions, he has failed to find the check nine times.

Though Kresge makes "predictions," he does not claim to have paranormal or clairvoyant powers, and is annoyed to be lumped with psychics.He teaches classes for law enforcement groups, which "focuses on psychological methods such as jogging lost memories through relaxation techniques or detecting lies through body language and voice inflections."

Bibliography

• Secrets of the Amazing Kreskin (Prometheus, 1991) ISBN 0-87975-676-4

References

This page incorporated content from The Amazing Kreskin, a page hosted on Wikipedia. Please consult the history of the original page to see a list of its authors. Therefor, this article is also available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

• 29 December 2007 CNN
• Whatever happened to The Amazing Kreskin?

External links

• The Amazing Kreskin, his official site
• The Amazing World of Kreskin at the Internet Movie Database
• The New Kreskin Show at the Internet Movie Database
• Kreskin at the Internet Movie Database
• The Amazing Kreskin on The Hour

This biographical material is about a living person.
Such material requires a high degree of sensitivity,
and must adhere strictly to all applicable laws in the United States.
See MagicPedia:Biographies_of_living_persons for more information.