Mismade Girl

The Mismade Girl (or Mis-Made Lady or Divided Lady) is a stage illusion, designed by Chuck Jones, with suggestions by Bev Bergeron, in 1968 and featured on Mark Wilson's TV show "Magic Land of Allakazam" and in Doug Henning's Broadway Magic Show which opened in 1974.

Doug Henning preforming Mismade

Basic Effect

Four cubes with open top and bottom are stacked to form a cabinet. An assistant stands inside and the cabinet is closed. Metal blades are slid into the cabinet, apparently slicing the assistant into four pieces, and closing the top and bottom of each cube. The cubes are then unstacked, and restacked in a different order. Inset doors in the front of the cabinet are opened, and it appears that the assistant's body has divided and rearranged. The whole process is then reversed, and the assistant is released unharmed.

The Mismade Girl can also be performed as a production effect - four cubes, each apparently too small to contain a person, are stacked into a cabinet, which is then opened to reveal someone inside.

The Masked Magician performed the Mismade Girl on his third television special, with Elizabeth Ramos as his assistant.

Variants

• Peter Gossamer performs a version called Totally Tubular, which uses a vertical tube, made of a dark translucent plastic, with a crude humaniform outline on the front. After restacking, rather than opening doors, lights are turned on inside, apparently showing the assistant divided into pieces, before then opening the front of the slice containing the assistant's head. Instead of reversing the process, sections of the outline are exchanged, and the blades then removed.
• The variant of the reassembly phase where the magi simply moves the door numbers on the mismatched sections into proper order was created by Orson Welles with Chuck Jones.
• Italian Mismade, or Mismade Improved is a version in which the assistant's hands and feet are in view for much of the illusion.

References

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